FontForge and moving forward

Posted May 7, 2015 19:39 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141)
In reply to: FontForge and moving forward by halla
Parent article: FontForge and moving forward

Yeah, I think that I indeed missed it. Still, I do think that JavaScript has solved at least some of the "problems" such as how to handle strings (especially if I can compare to C), so it is probable that most programs are simpler, shorter, and less prone to security vulnerabilities and segfaults when written in JS. So I think it's at least plausible to argue that some applications would indeed be better when written in JS.

On the other hand, I have no expectation that every kind of application can be ran from the browser sandbox. indeed, application such as Blender or some video or sound editor would probably prove to be either impossible or perform very poorly. However, this is more a question about the APIs available to developer than about the fundamental implausibility of the task.

FontForge and moving forward

Posted May 14, 2015 10:01 UTC (Thu) by ssokolow (guest, #94568) [Link] (2 responses)

Given how much onus JavaScript puts on the developer to ensure the codebase remains maintainable (duck-typed dynamism doesn't help there), my hopes are for Emscripten being updated to a new enough version of LLVM for such apps to be written in Rust.

(If you haven't tried the Rust 1.0 beta, I highly recommend trying the 1.0 final release that's coming out tomorrow. It's got string handling, package management, segfault-immunity, and GTK bindings that place it in competition with languages like Python and JavaScript but it compiles to GC-less native code with performance comparable to C or C++ and not only does it have a great FFI for calling C code, it makes it really easy to generate libraries that C code can call.)

http://rust-lang.org/ (Downloads)
https://play.rust-lang.org/ (In-browser compile+run playpen)
https://github.com/ctjhoa/rust-learning (Curated list of learning materials)
https://github.com/kud1ing/awesome-rust (Curated list of libraries)
https://crates.io/ (NPM/PyPI equivalent)
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/35ue7y/rust_with_e... (Source for my Emscripten comment)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LazvK39Oc4U (Ghe concepts behind Rust and calling Rust from Ruby)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CwJ0MH-4MA (Calling Rust from Python)

Noteworthy tutorials:
http://doc.rust-lang.org/1.0.0/book/
http://www.rustforrubyists.com/

Noteworthy Libraries:
https://github.com/rust-gnome (PyGTK/PyGI equivalent)
http://www.piston.rs/ (PyGame equivalent)
https://github.com/kbknapp/clap-rs/ (Very nice command-line argument parser)
http://arewewebyet.com/ (Overview of server-side web frameworks)

...and the subreddit and IRC channel are very helpful.

FontForge and moving forward

Posted May 14, 2015 16:50 UTC (Thu) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link] (1 responses)

I have only read praise about Rust, and am very eager to try it in what seems to be a good fit. What is the state of scientific computing in Rust? is there any equivalent of SciPy, NumPy, Scikits, Pandas, IPython and the most important one for me matplotlib in Rust?

FontForge and moving forward

Posted May 15, 2015 5:26 UTC (Fri) by ssokolow (guest, #94568) [Link]

I don't personally use scientific computing stuff with heavy enough data loads to need anything more performant than ipython-notebook and it's not the kind of glamourous stuff that get trumpeted from the rooftops, so I don't have a ready answer.

However, crates.io does appear to already have a couple of different BLAS bindings, so there are obviously some people interested in that use.