"Unicode of Death"

[Marcel Schneider]

On Fri, 4 Sep 2015 23:01:09 +0530, Christopher Fynn  wrote:
[...]
>> On Saturday, 30 May 2015, Philippe Verdy  wrote:
>>
>>> 2015-05-28 23:36 GMT+02:00 Andrew Cunningham :
>>>>
>>>> Not the first time unicode crashes things. There was the google chrome bug on osx that crashed the tab for any syriac text.
>>>
>>> "Unicode crashes things"? Unicode has nothing to do in those crashes caused by bugs in applications that make incorrect assumptions (in fact not even related to characters themselves but to the supposed behavior of the layout engine. Programmers and designers for example VERY frequently forget the constraints for RTL languages and make incorrect assumptions about left and right sides when sizing objects, or they don't expect that the cursor will advance backward and forget that some measurements can be negative: if they use this negative value to compute the size of a bitmap redering surface, they'll get out of memory, unchecked null pointers returned, then they will crash assuming the buffer was effectively allocated.
>>> These are the same kind of bugs as with the too common buffer overruns with unchecked assumtions: the code is kept because "it works as is" in their limited immediate tests.
>>> Producing full coverage tests is a difficult and lengthy task, that programmers not always have the time to do, when they are urged to produce a workable solution for some clients and then given no time to improve the code before the same code is distributed to a wider range of clients.
>>> Commercial staffs do that frequently, they can't even read the technical limitations even when they are documented by programmers... in addition the commercial staff like selling softwares that will cause customers to ask for support... that will be billed ! After that, programmers are overwhelmed by bug reports and support requests, and have even less time to design other thigs that they are working on and still have to produce. QA tools may help programmers in this case by providing statistics about the effective costs of producing new software with better quality, and the cost of supporting it when it contains too many bugs: commercial teams like those statistics because they can convert them to costs, commercial margins, and billing rates. (When such QA tools are not used, programmers will rapidly leave the place, they are fed up by the growing pressure to do always more in the same time, with also a growing number of "urgent" support requests.).
>>> Those that say "Unicode crashes things" do the same thing: they make broad unchecked assumptions about how things are really made or how things are actually working.


Voilà a very huge part of the answer to my various questions. 
Iʼve joined up too late...

>>> commercial staff like selling softwares that will cause customers to ask for support... that will be billed !

That was my suspicion when I faced so much problems. So thereʼs nothing more to await—

Thanks Philippe!

Marcel 
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