i18n-enabled builds

[bnoordhuis]

Requires bundling and building Chromium's copy of ICU; see the DEPS file in the v8/ directory. We'll just have to take the repo size and build time increase on the chin.

Stretch goal: compile/link against an external copy of ICU. No guarantees as to whether it actually a) builds, and b) runs. Upstream V8 makes no such guarantees either.

[petebannister]

Maybe worth investigating using a package manager / cmake find_package for this? e.g. vcpkg and/or conan. Users can decide whether or not to pull that in if they need it then.
I don't personally need this currently so would ideally want to avoid the cost it if possible.

[bnoordhuis]

Chromium/V8 is built against a Google fork of ICU so I'm not 100% sure that works (or keeps working.)

Node.js vendors a different copy of ICU so it's not completely impossible but I'm a Node.js maintainer and I can confidently say it's not always smooth sailing. Upgrades are sometimes painful.

If nothing else, linking to different versions of ICU means you get different output (because of different CLDR versions) and that's just confusing. I lean toward vendoring for that reason.

[petebannister]

I see.. perhaps this is one of limited use cases where a git submodule would work well and create a new repo for the ICU fork

[mscdex]

What is the status of this or what is required to add support exactly? Is it as simple as dropping the Chromium ICU files in somewhere and that's it and/or is there a substantial amount of cmake-related changes required ? I see there is at least some references to i18n in there currently...

[bnoordhuis]

Status is "untested" with a hunch it won't work out of the box. The references you see are mostly around carefully removing i18n files from the build plan