Dart Language (ECMA-408) and Unicode

I saw a Tweet about Google's Dart language specification being approved by ECMA (European Computer Manufacturers Association). It reminded me about Dart and I thought "It's a new language, I should put it through the UnicodeOutOfTheBoxTests".

I had second thoughts when I started to download Dart and noticed that it was over 100Mb. So I checked the new published ECMA-408 and found that Dart strings are UTF-16 and there appears to be no other Unicode support.

I came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth the time to write the Unicode tests in Dart as the results would be identical to JavaScript.

Unicode Out of the Box tests

I've been helping out a little with the development of the Red language since the day It was announced. One of the things that I've done is to look into what supporting Unicode in Red would involve and what level of support should be provided in the binary distribution. As part of this, I wanted to understand the capabilities of other languages.

Rather than simply search the web and browse a few documents, I decided to put languages to the test. So I developed a set of tests that would give a more substantial indication of a language's Unicode ability with invaluable help from Anton of The Red Team.

The 25 tests have been completed in 15 languages written by members of the Rebol community, Anton and myself. (Red is heavily inspired by Rebol). 

Coming up with the tests took some work but it was interesting and I've learnt a lot in the process. Writing the code was fun though it was quite slow in the languages that I am not very familiar.

Why don't you take a look at the Unicode Out of the Box Tests?