[Mono-dev] Why do we need separate I18N assemblies?

[Jonathan Pryor]

On Mon, 2006-06-26 at 03:33 +0200, Kornél Pál wrote:
> Anyway it could be much easier to have them [i18n assemblies] in
> corlib, so they could take advantage of corlib internals and have a
> list of them rather than using reflection that is slow.
> 
> This would increase the size of corlib but MS.NET 2.0 has an mscorlib.dll of 
> size 4,10 MB so ours still would be smaller.:)

Think "embedded environments."  Think Maemo (the Nokia 770 Internet
Connector).

Adding all locale data to mscorlib.dll would bloat it, making it less
appropriate for non-desktop environments.

Of course, you could "split out" the "unneeded" locale data to make
mscorlib.dll smaller, but if you happen to need one of those "unneeded"
locales there is no easy way to add support for it under your approach,
while the existing approach only requires adding the appropriate
assembly...

We should stick with the current approach.  The Reflection overhead is
just to _load_ the I18n data, not to _access_ it.

 - Jon