[Seaside-dev] Re: [Seaside Commits] Seaside 3.0: Grease-Tests-Pharo-Core-jok.7.mcz

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 04/19/2010 10:37 PM, John O'Keefe wrote:
> Sorry for the delay in responding -- this note got lost in the
> blizzard of GSoC stuff.
>
> GreaseCoreTests contains a lot of tests using unicode characters, so
> why would this one be Pharo-specific?  Couldn't/Shouldn't it just be
> added to GRPlatformTest>>#testConvertToSmalltalkNewlines if there is
> some concern about newline conversion and unicode behaving badly
> together?  I admit that I didn't even look to see if it was there -- I
> assumed (badly) that it was.  I would be happy to put it there to
> relieve the concern.

We did get those tests to pass under GNU Smalltalk; however, this was 
probably not the best implementation possible, for two reasons.

First, introducing a lot of encoding and decoding is going to hurt 
performance.  Second, in GNU Smalltalk you cannot #nextPutAll: a 
non-encoded String onto an encoded String, so it hurts portability too.

So, for Seaside 3.0 (and Iliad 0.8, which is using Grease) we're 
supporting the null codec only.  For 3.1, as already discussed, I'd 
suggest rethinking the codecs to do triangulation between encodings 
automatically.  This would be much faster for gst because the 
triangulation is done by the C library via iconv, and would bypass the 
performance and portability problems above.

Paolo