Let's mark the wrappers over Intl methods as deprecated

[yslpn]

Problem Description

When I faced the need to use the Intl.ListFormat and Intl.NumberFormatOptions methods, I could not understand why the library had wrappers for NumberFormatOptions and DateTimeFormatOptions, but no ListFormat. I had to spend time to find #2223, but it seems that there is no final solution. New methods are not added, and old method wrappers remained in i18n for current version of lingui.

The main problem is wasting time on research and misunderstanding the best practices that should be used in your project.

Proposed Solution

I suggest marking the wrapper methods over Intl as deprecated via JSDoc for a while, and removing them in the next major. Also write a comment about this in the documentation, that the recommended way is to use Intl methods directly.

Alternatives Considered

Maybe you could just add to the documentation an explanation of why only two Intl methods have wrappers.

P.S: if we reach an agreement, I can help and create a pull request.

[timofei-iatsenko]

Agree with you, however i think we can provide a tree-shakeable version of these utils specifically for react in react package.

Because these utils not only wrappers but also a cache for intl methods. Do you think it's worth it to keep them in the library? Or let this happend in the userland?

[timofei-iatsenko]

Here is a benchmark cached vs not cached https://www.measurethat.net/Benchmarks/Show/17387/0/new-intldatetimeformat-vs-cached-intldatetimeformat

[yslpn]

Because these utils are not only wrappers but also a cache for intl methods. Do you think it's worth it to keep them in the library? Or let this happend in the userland?

My intuition and experience tell me that it's better to narrowly specialize a library than to do everything at once. Over time, it becomes difficult to maintain all the functionality.

Agree with you, however I think we can provide a tree-shakeable version of these utils specifically for react in the react package.

Providing special versions for React can be interpreted as meaning that any frontend framework should get its own memoized versions, which will also complicate support.

And I believe that the React ecosystem and/or library creators will be able to switch to react-compiler, which will automatically add memoization.

[timofei-iatsenko]

Ok, let's do that. I think also a corresponding blog post or at least release notes with explanation why we do that and what is a migration steps should be prepared.