icu

icu is the main meta-crate of the ICU4X project.

It provides a comprehensive selection of functionality found in International Components for Unicode in their canonical configurations intended to enable software internationalization capabilities.

This crate exists to collect the most important functionality for users together in one place. It does not bring any unique functionality, but rather, it re-exports the relevant crates as modules. The exported crate corresponding to each module is also available in a stand-alone manner, i.e. icu::list as icu_list.

Data Management

Most functionality relies on data which clients have to provide to the APIs.

ICU4X uses the concept of a DataProvider to separate data from logic. Data providers come in many different forms; the following providers are provided by ICU4X in separate crates:

• BlobDataProvider: uses an in-memory serde-serialized blob. This is the most flexible provider, and data can be updated at runtime.
• BakedDataProvider: a code-generated provider that contains the data directly in Rust code. This is the most efficient provider as it's serialization-free, and allows for compile-time optimizations.
• FsDataProvider: uses a file system tree of Serde files. This is mostly useful for development and not recommended in production for performance reasons.
• icu_provider_adapters: this crate contains APIs to combine providers or provide additional functionality such as locale fallback.

The data that is required by these providers (in BakedDataProvider's case, the provider itself) can be generated and customized using the icu_datagen crate.

The following example uses the icu_testdata crate, which contains prepackaged data providers for a small set of locales.

Example

use icu::calendar::DateTime;
use icu::datetime::{options::length, DateTimeFormatter};
use icu::locid::locale;
use writeable::assert_writeable_eq;

let options = length::Bag::from_date_time_style(
    length::Date::Long,
    length::Time::Medium,
)
.into();

let dtf = DateTimeFormatter::try_new_unstable(
    &icu_testdata::unstable(),
    &locale!("es").into(),
    options,
)
.expect("Failed to create DateTimeFormatter instance.");

let date = DateTime::try_new_iso_datetime(2020, 9, 12, 12, 35, 0)
    .expect("Failed to parse date.");
let date = date.to_any();

let formatted_date = dtf.format(&date).expect("Formatting failed");
assert_writeable_eq!(formatted_date, "12 de septiembre de 2020, 12:35:00");

let formatted_date_string =
    dtf.format_to_string(&date).expect("Formatting failed");
assert_eq!(formatted_date_string, "12 de septiembre de 2020, 12:35:00");

Features

ICU4X components share a set of common Cargo features that control whether core pieces of functionality are compiled. These features are:

• std: Whether to include std support. Without this Cargo feature, icu is #[no_std]-compatible
• serde: Whether to include serde::Deserialize implementations for data structs, such as SymbolsV1, and serde::{Serialize, Deserialize} implementations for core library types, such as Locale. These are required with serde-backed providers like [BlobDataProvider][^1].
• experimental: Whether to enable experimental preview features. Modules enabled with this feature may not be production-ready and could change at any time.

The following Cargo features are only available on the individual crates, but not on this meta-crate:

• datagen: Whether to implement serde::Serialize and functionality that is only required during data generation.
• bench: Whether to enable exhaustive benchmarks. This can be enabled on individual crates when running cargo bench.

There are additional features that, when enabled on specific crates, enable functionality across ICU4X:

• icu_provider/sync: makes DataPayload implement Send + Sync, which in turn makes most ICU4X objects also implement Send + Sync.
• icu_provider/deserialize_*: enables ICU4X buffer providers to read various different serialization formats. See BufferProvider for details.

[^1]: If using blob data, you need to enable one of the deserialization Cargo features on the icu_provider crate, as noted above.

More Information

For more information on development, authorship, contributing etc. please visit ICU4X home page.