HarfBuzz is now available on Emacs master

Emacs 27 is becoming quite a exciting release (at least as far Emacs can be exciting). This and pdumper seems to be a quite nice modernization for the ancient codebase that is Emacs.

Some more info in this thread from December: https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/a5upu5/emacs_text_sh...

What does this change in practice? Are there before/after screenshots?

For the western emacs user probably not much. Unfortunately, the ability to use non-latin typefaces in the apps are often (resasonably) neglect by most devs.

Using HarfBuzz (that is a font shapping library), the dev don't have to worry about how the text is going to look in other languages, such arabic, chinese, etc. The library will take care of that.

HarfBuzz is the same text engine used by Firefox and XeLaTex.

Also it allows the user to use features such ligatures, font weight, emojis. Not sure if emacs will support those from the start.

Any potential perf improvements ?

from the reddit thread:

> Ligature support, yes. Also colored emoji and other similar features.

Does this mean macOS users get their Emojis back?