About nymus

Philosophy

I strongly believe that the internationalization of an application should impose as little runtime overhead as possible. this means that:

1. No more message strings should be loaded than are being used by any given javascript bundle.
2. No more parsing or transformation should be needed before a string can be used as compared to a hand-written component.

To achieve the first criterium, nymus relies on tree-shaking. It will generate tree-shakeable component files in ES6 module format. It relies on existing javascript tools, like webpack, to eliminate unused code from the bundles.

To achieve the second criterium, nymus will translate each ICU message into a highly optimized React component. All parsing is done at build time, and the component generates strings with just string templateng. To illustrate:

{
  "Message": "Hello there, {name}, your score is {score, number, percent}."
}

Should result into code equivalent to

const number = new Intl.NumberFormat('en', { style: 'percent' });
export function Message({ name, score }) {
  return `Hello there, ${name}, your score is ${number.format(score)}.`;
}

To get an idea of how nymus translates messages, head over to the playground to try it for yourself.

Acknowledgements

This project wouldn't be possible without the following libraries:

• formatjs
• typecript
• babel