Qt5 and ICU - too much overhead?

[sfcheng77]

I am surprised to learn that Qt5 now depends on ICU even for the Windows versions if you want to use the webkit module. The ICU dll libraries are way too big on Windows. The ict51dt.dll is 21MB, for example. After the ICU libraries are included, the setup file of my webkit-based application will go from 10MB to 20MB.

Why is webkit suddently dependent on ICU now? In QT4, webkit works fine without ICU on windows and I don't have any problem viewing international websites.

Can ICU be linked statically in order to reduce the size overhead?

[wysota]

http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt-5-ICU

[krandell]

That link does not answer the question. It says that "QtWebKit already requires ICU", but as the original poster noted, it was possible to compile and execute QTWebkit in Qt4 for Windows without the ICU library.

[wysota]

It says that "QtWebKit already requires ICU", but as the original poster noted, it was possible to compile and execute QTWebkit in Qt4 for Windows without the ICU library.

Maybe the WebKit version Qt4 used did not depend on ICU and the version Qt5 uses does depend on it?

[krandell]

I did some further digging. It appears that the webkit developers believed the Qt developers were already introducing a hard dependency on ICU, and therefore moved from using Qt Unicode functions to ICU for consistency with other platforms:
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76821

Independently of Qt, there is interest in reducing the large overhead that ICU introduces to webkit:
http://mac-os-forge.2317878.n4.nabbl...-td219912.html
And there's an abstraction layer which theoretically enables switching to something else, though nothing seems to be forthcoming.