Roadmap

February 4, 2026 · View on GitHub

Updated: 2026-02-05 | Format: Now / Next / Later

Vision

The fastest Unicode width calculation library in the Go ecosystem — correct emoji handling, zero allocations, full Unicode compliance. A drop-in replacement for go-runewidth.

Now (v0.2.0 — Current Release)

  • 4-tier O(1) lookup: ASCII → CJK → Emoji → 3-stage table (3.8KB)
  • SWAR optimization: ASCII detection and width counting at 8 bytes/iter
  • ZWJ emoji sequences: 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 = width 2 (forward-scan state machine)
  • Emoji modifiers: Skin tones 👍🏽 = width 2
  • Variation selectors: U+FE0E (text) / U+FE0F (emoji)
  • Regional indicator pairs: Flag emoji 🇺🇸 = width 2
  • Unicode 16.0 compliance
  • 96.4% test coverage, zero lint issues

Next (v0.3.0)

  • Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) — expected 10-20% speedup on hot paths
  • Benchmark CI — automated regression detection on every PR
  • Unicode 17.0 preparation — generator pipeline ready for next release
  • Keycap sequences — #️⃣, *️⃣, 0️⃣-9️⃣
  • Migration guide — step-by-step from go-runewidth
  • API review — gather feedback from early adopters

Later (v1.0.0+)

API Freeze

  • Stable API guarantee (no breaking changes until v2.0)
  • Semantic versioning commitment
  • Validated by multiple production projects

Explicit SIMD

  • Go assembly (Plan 9 .s files) — SSE2/AVX2/NEON, 16-32 bytes/iter
  • archsimd (Go 1.26+) — portable SIMD intrinsics (golang/go#67520)
  • AVX-512 — server-side bulk processing, 64 bytes/iter
  • ARM NEON — Apple Silicon / AWS Graviton

Grapheme Clusters (Conditional)

  • Full UAX #29 support (opt-in, not default)
  • Reactivation: when users report incorrect widths for specific scripts

Ecosystem

  • Phoenix TUI integration
  • unigrapheme — companion grapheme segmentation library

Non-Goals

  • Automatic locale detection (use Options API)
  • Font-specific width variations
  • Backward compatibility below Go 1.25
  • Full ICU replacement

Contributing

We welcome contributions in these areas:

  1. Bug reports — width calculation issues, emoji mismatches
  2. Performance testing — benchmarks on different hardware
  3. Real-world usage — integrate in your app, report API friction
  4. Unicode edge cases — sequences we handle incorrectly

See GitHub Issues for current work items.