I need to look into this some more as well. I ran into a case today building everything from scratch where gcc 8.2 doesn't seem to want to compile icu 55.1 version either. Not sure if it's an environmental fluke because I thought I had done that before, but I tried gcc-7 as well and it errored also. gcc-5 works as expected. It may just be time that an upgrade of icu is in order.