the last version to support older platforms such as Windows XP and Windows Vista. Support for AIX, Solaris and z/OS may also be limited in later versions (i.e. building depends on compiler support). ICU has been included as a standard component with Microsoft Windows since Windows 10 version 1703. ICU has historically used UTF-16, and still does only for Java; while for C/C++ UTF-8 is supported, including the correct handling of "illegal UTF-8". Origin and development After Taligent became part of IBM in early 1996, Sun Microsystems decided that the new Java language should have better support for internationalization. Since Taligent had experience with such technologies and were close geographically, their Text and International group were asked to contribute the international classes to the Java Development Kit as part of the JDK 1.1 internationalization APIs. A large portion of this code still exists in the and packages. Further internationalization features were added with each later release of Java. The Java internationalization classes were then ported to C++ and C as part of a library known as ICU4C ("ICU for C"). The ICU project also provides ICU4J ("ICU for Java"), which adds features not present in the standard Java libraries. ICU4C and ICU4J are very similar, though not identical; for example, ICU4C includes a Regular Expression API, while ICU4J does not. Both frameworks have been enhanced over time to support new facilities and new features of Unicode and Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). ICU was released as an open-source project in 1999 under the name IBM Classes for Unicode. It was later renamed to International Components For Unicode. In May, 2016, the ICU project joined the Unicode consortium as technical committee ICU-TC, and the library sources are now distributed under the Unicode license. MessageFormat A part of ICU is the MessageFormat class, a formatting system that allows for any number of arguments to control the plural form (, ) or more general switch-case-style selection () for things like grammatical gender. These statements can be nested. ICU MessageFormat was created by adding the plural and selection system to an identically-named system in Java SE. Alternatives An alternative for using ICU with C++, or to using it directly, is to use Boost.Locale, which is a C++ wrapper for ICU (while also allowing other backends). The claim for using it rather than ICU directly is that "is absolutely unfriendly to C++ developers. It ignores