[Fribidi-discuss] Re: BiDi WINE status and fribidi

[Tomas Frydrych]

> > Actually, this might come rather handy for me in AbiWord, and it
> > would speed up the bidi processing when character types are known
> > apriory, since it would save the lookups in Unicode tables.
> 
> I don't see how abiword could possibly know the character types
> without referencing the Unicode tables?

It does not, but it remembers them. If I have string

   XYZ 

into which I insert character A

   XYAZ

the current processing requires to re-lookup types for XYZ. Now, 
caching types for individual characters might not be particularly 
desirable in all cases, but in my case X, Y, Z are not characters, 
they are runs of characters of identical type, and I have to 
remember the types because of other processing I do with these 
runs.

> Btw, the fribidi character
> lookup is heavily optimized through a two level lookup table (that was
> contributed by Owen Taylor). There might be some slight gain by
> caching of the information, but I think it is negligable compared to
> the rest of the work done on each string.

Great, but best optimatization is not to do what does not have to be 
done. Lot of negligeable savings often make the difference between 
fast and slow code. Anyway, I would benefit from being able to 
supply the character types, even though I manage fine without it.

Tomas