Erlang ships with its own embedding of the Unicode
Codebase for a couple releases and this release changes
Elixir to depend on it in order to compute grapheme
clusters.
The Erlang implementation was up to 2x faster in low
codepoints (such as latin1) while the Elixir one could
be faster up to 3x in high codepoints (such as emoji)
so at the end the performance results are roughly the
same. As a benefit, we no longer need to ship our copy
of the grapheme cluster algorithm, which would take up
to 250kB in disk and more than 15 seconds to compile.
Note we still keep our own String downcase and upcase
algorithms, as our version is considerably more efficient
on all cases since it works exclusively with binaries
(more than 5x faster).
José Valim
3f5b3f00f1