Unicode Support

Written on April 21, 2008 by Mike Gerwitz

I have been trying to determine for some time now whether or not to provide unicode support in MCBB for PHP versions less than 6 (which will support it natively). I’ve determined that, because MyCustomBB will, more likely than not, be released after PHP 6, it will not be worth investing the time to build in unicode support for lower PHP versions. Therefore, users of PHP 5 and lower will not have unicode support. However, when you upgrade to PHP 6, MyCustomBB will detect this, convert the character set of the necessary tables and you will have complete unicode support.

My reason for not adding unicode support to previous versions is because it will slow down the system too much - the system I am trying to optimize as much as possible. PHP 6 will natively support it and is compiled with highly optimized C code - much better than an interpreted language. Therefore, anything the PHP developers write will be faster than anything I could write in PHP. I also don’t want MCBB to have extra depricated unicode functions (that I would have created) when someone switches to PHP 6, providing redundant support and slowing it down even more.

Posted in Planning