ICU 76 RC

We are pleased to announce the release candidate for Unicode® ICU 76. It updates to Unicode 16 (blog), including new characters and scripts, emoji, collation & IDNA changes, and corresponding APIs and implementations. It also updates to CLDR 46 (beta blog) locale data with new locales, significant updates to existing locales, and various additions and corrections. For example, the CLDR and Unicode default sort orders are now very nearly the same.

Most of the java.time (Temporal) types can now be formatted directly using the existing ICU4J date/time formatting classes.

There are some new APIs to make ICU easier to use with modern C++ and Java patterns. Most of the C/C++ APIs added for this purpose are implemented as C++ header-only APIs, and usable on top of binary stable C APIs, which is a first for ICU.

The Java and C++ technology preview implementations of the (also in tech preview) CLDR MessageFormat 2.0 specification have been updated to match recent changes.

ICU 76 and CLDR 46 are major releases, including a new version of Unicode and major locale data improvements.

For details, please see https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/download/76.html.

Please test this release candidate on your platforms and report bugs and regressions by Monday, 2024-oct-21, via the icu-support mailing list, and/or please find/submit error reports.

Please do not use this release candidate in production.

The preliminary API reference documents are published on unicode-org.github.io/icu-docs/ – follow the “Dev” links there.