On 5/25/2015 2:45 PM, Ken Brown wrote:
> BTW, I contacted Philip Kime, the author of Biber, about
> Unicode::Normalize.  He told me that version 1.18 is unusably slow.
> Here's a bug report he filed about it:
>
>    https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=102766
>
> I think he's planning to pursue it further.

It doesn't look like anything is going to change in the near future. 
According to the bug report I cited, Biber runs slower by a factor of 20 
with version 1.18 of Unicode::Normalize than with version 1.17.  I don't 
think that's acceptable.

The only solution I can think of is to ship Biber as a self-contained 
Perl Archive made with PAR::Packer[*], built with version 1.17 of 
Unicode::Normalize.  I've gotten the latter from backpan and built it 
locally using the attached cygport file.

Does anyone have a better idea?

Ken

[*] This is the way Biber is shipped by TeX Live on all platforms on 
which the Biber author can build it.  This includes i686-cygwin but not 
x86_64-cygwin, because he doesn't have a 64-bit Cygwin system.  But I am 
expecting to build it on x86_64-cygwin and send it upstream for 
inclusion in TeX Live.  I already have it built and just need to do a 
little more testing.