TW: Meme language

Posted Jul 9, 2024 13:37 UTC (Tue) by xophos (subscriber, #75267)
In reply to: TW: Meme language by Deleted user 129183
Parent article: Esfahbod: State of Text Rendering 2024

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.)