It seems that people at Twitter just did this for Ruby --
reimplementation from scratch with an API oriented towards Ruby users.

A summary
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6263

Of course it depends on what you expect to achieve.
This thread starts with aiming at getting German, French and Spanish
sorting done. Plus some other similar cases.

The algorithms are table driven and the tables are read into the
Smalltalk image as is.

As of now the Unicode Character Database is in the Squeak/Pharo image
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6244

Getting the sorting done does not seem to be extraordinary hard.
However making use of the Smalltalk ICU wrapper is surely an option.

--Hannes

On 12/9/15, Todd Blanchard <tblanchard at mac.com> wrote:
> They are practically the same thing.
>
> ICU was developed by Taligent which was a joint venture between Apple and
> IBM.  Makes sense that NSString and ICU's UnicodeString are pretty close in
> implementation.  ICU was also ported to Java for Sun by IBM.  The point is -
> this is a very elaborate chunk of code with far reach. If ICU is wrong on
> some point - it is universally wrong and thus likely to be taken as "right"
> as it is at least consistent.  I think re-implementing it is folly TBH.
> Just use it.
>
>> On Dec 8, 2015, at 15:52, EuanM <euanmee at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Equally old are the NextStep Object C functions which are now embodied
>> within MacOS X.
>>
>
>
>