A years-long Turkish alphabet bug in the Kotlin compiler
10 hours ago
- #Localization
- #Kotlin
- #CompilerBugs
- A Turkish alphabet bug in the Kotlin compiler caused build failures for Turkish developers due to locale-sensitive case conversions.
- The issue was first reported in 2016 but took five years to fully resolve, affecting compiler outputs, coroutines, and array functions.
- The bug stemmed from differences in how the letter 'I' is capitalized in Turkish (İ) versus English (I), leading to mismatches in function names.
- Key fixes included specifying a fixed locale (Locale.US) for case conversions and replacing ambiguous functions like capitalize() with more precise alternatives.
- Kotlin 1.5 and later versions introduced locale-agnostic case conversion functions (uppercase(), lowercase()) to prevent similar issues in the future.
- The story highlights the importance of considering locale settings in software development and the challenges of internationalization.