Notes about the tools/icu subdirectory

This directory contains tools and information about the International Components for Unicode (ICU) integration. Both V8 and Node.js use ICU to provide internationalization functionality.

• patches/ are one-off patches, actually entire source file replacements, organized by ICU version number.
• icu_small.json controls the “small” (English only) ICU. It is input to icutrim.py
• icu-generic.gyp is the build file used for most ICU builds within ICU.
• icu-system.gyp is an alternate build file used when --with-intl=system-icu is invoked. It builds against the pkg-config located ICU.
• iculslocs.cc is source for the iculslocs utility, invoked by icutrim.py as part of repackaging. Not used separately. See source for more details.
• no-op.cc contains an empty function to convince gyp to use a C++ compiler.
• shrink-icu-src.py is used during upgrade (see guide below).

Note:

The files in this directory were written for the Node.js 0.12 effort. The original intent was to merge the tools such as icutrim.py and iculslocs.cc back into ICU. ICU has gained its own “data slicer” tool. There is an issue open, https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/25136 for replacing icutrim.py with the ICU data slicergithub.

See Also

• docs/guides/maintaining-icu.md for information on maintaining ICU in Node.js

• docs/api/intl.md for information on the internationalization-related APIs in Node.js

• The ICU Homepage