TW: Meme language

Posted Jul 9, 2024 10:20 UTC (Tue) by Deleted user 129183 (guest, #129183)
Parent article: Esfahbod: State of Text Rendering 2024

> While the Rust migration is beneficial to the ecosystem in the long term, in the short term it has the potential to fragment the ecosystem

This will definitely fragment the ‘ecosystem’ and not only in the short term.

For example, KDE does not want to force Rust as a hard dependency of the Frameworks:

https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kiconthemes/-/merge_req...

TW: Meme language

Posted Jul 9, 2024 10:45 UTC (Tue) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link] (2 responses)

I think I'd want to see a bit more evidence for that than some off-hand comment about a mild concern from one person 4 years ago

TW: Meme language

Posted Jul 9, 2024 11:33 UTC (Tue) by ArkansasTraveler (guest, #171756) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, you can read about people complaining about forcing a dependency on Rust also in those articles:

https://lwn.net/Articles/771355/
https://lwn.net/Articles/845535/

One of it is pretty much prophetic:

> We saw a problem similar to that of Gentoo's back in 2018 with Debian and librsvg and we are likely to see it recur—frequently—over the coming years.

TW: Meme language

Posted Jul 9, 2024 12:55 UTC (Tue) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link]

So a few people moaning in 2018 (6 years ago), and again in 2021 (3 years ago). And since then, despite the complaints, both of them appear to have just went ahead and depended on Rust code since anyway?

I do genuinely understand the objections there fwiw. Fewer architectures and longer bootstrap chains can be annoying. I agree with the KDE contributor, it's a thing that should be discussed.[1]

However today any distro that wants to package GNOME (or even just have working nvidia or opencl drivers) needs to package a bunch of rust code anyway. You say it's prescient, but I personally haven't heard any of those complaints since the pyca fiasco. I'm not terribly convinced using it in something like text shaping would actually be a big deal at this point.[2]

[1] Although I do wish we discussed it regarding build time dependencies on e.g. Perl too
[2] Or at least, not as big as a deal as people who title threads things like "TW: Meme language" want it to be.

TW: Meme language

Posted Jul 9, 2024 13:37 UTC (Tue) by xophos (subscriber, #75267) [Link] (3 responses)

I would have thought that a few people could be nervous because they plan to add support for WASM in a f*ing font rendering engine.
At this point switching to rust for the added safety is just about the least they need to do...

TW: Meme language

Posted Jul 9, 2024 15:38 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Compared to how fonts have been constructed and shaped historically... I'd very much prefer the WASM at this point. The Rust requirement isn't a big ask if it can be built with gccrs.

TW: Meme language

Posted Jul 9, 2024 15:43 UTC (Tue) by lunaryorn (subscriber, #111088) [Link] (1 responses)

I guess it's probably not that big a step from true type byte code to WASM.

TW: Meme language

Posted Jul 9, 2024 18:26 UTC (Tue) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

In addition to the old hinting bytecode, there's also Graphite (https://graphite.sil.org/) with its own custom programming language and stack machine interpreter, which has been known to have security vulnerabilities (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa201...). If that could be replaced with a well-tested widely-used WASM runtime, it might be a net benefit to security, in addition to providing more flexibility and better performance.

(https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz-wasm-examples has some examples of where the flexibility is useful for real languages.)