Qt5 and ICU - too much 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.