I don't know why ICU did it that way. libunistring did it a bit better, but they also are too big and not performant enough to power coreutils.
The best approach is currently a hybrid of 3-level arrays and a bsearch in a small list of exceptions. This is about 10x smaller and has the same performance. The properties can be boolean, int or strings, so there's no one-fits all solution.
The best approach is currently a hybrid of 3-level arrays and a bsearch in a small list of exceptions. This is about 10x smaller and has the same performance. The properties can be boolean, int or strings, so there's no one-fits all solution.