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On 21 Jan 2004, at 22:58, foser wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 21:01, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
>
>> Since avenj was too lazy to subscribe =P :
>> <avenj> wasn't there some kind of potential performance hit there?
>> <avenj> i thought i was thinking someone thought part of the issue 
>> with
>> RH's performance was utf8 default, but now i'm thinking i'm not sure
>
> You don't mean python's alleged performance hit (this got shortly
> discussed on -dev by lqx) ? To attribute a full systems performance to
> UTF-8 sounds far fetched to me. Anyway, the benefits likely outclass
> performance loss.

Exactly, the performance hit is minimal for people who don't care about 
UTF-8. The only performance hit was in python _if_ you used UTF-8 in a 
script/application. And the performance hit was not in processing time, 
but in memory consumption.

UTF-8 is pretty much essential to adoption by middle-eastern, european 
and cjk languages. It could probably be taken on as a desktop project, 
but I'd much rather it be a Gentoo-wide thing, because it affects much 
more than the desktop (for instance, if you password has an accent in 
it, then it will work differently under UTF-8.)

BTW, in respect to avenj's comment, there is no noticable performance 
hit on Redhat 8/9 because of UTF-8 support, unless you mean the fact 
that it would make glibc compiles a little bit longer because it 
generates more locales with UTF-8 character sets.

Cheers,
- --
Alastair 'liquidx' Tse
  >> Gentoo Developer
  >> http://www.liquidx.net/ | http://dev.gentoo.org/~liquidx/
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