Re: [precis] order of operations

[Peter Saint-Andre <[e-mail]>]

On 5/4/16 4:26 PM, Sam Whited wrote:
> On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 3:46 PM, Peter Saint-Andre <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> There's also the question of whether preparation / pre-processing is all
>> that useful. We added it so that constrained clients (e.g., clients that
>> can't realistically perform normalization) could avoid most of the problems
>> associated with having their strings rejected by a more powerful server that
>> actually does enforcement and comparison. Whether we really need to consider
>> such applications is another story.
>
> I'd be curious to know a "real world" use case for the preparation
> step optimization where enforcement is prohibitively expensive and
> comparison is not necessary (since comparison necessitates
> enforcement)?

The original suggestion (some years ago now) was browser-based clients 
that could not easily download the entire Unicode character database 
from a web server to the browser in order to do enforcement or 
comparison, but which could do something simpler like allow a user to 
create a username using a restricted repertoire of characters such as 
ASCII or "extended Latin".

Another example might be IoT clients running on microcontrollers with 
very limited memory and processor speed.

However, I have not seen benchmarks for such applications with respect 
to handling of internationalized strings.

> While benchmarking the implementation I did for Go I
> decided that it wasn't necessary to include a preparation step. Even
> on a heavily resource constrained server

Right, we've always figured that servers have more horsepower.

Peter