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Comment by danyim | Hacker News Reader

Why link to a fork instead of the main project? https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic

The reason is that the main project is written in C whereas this fork uses Rust instead as explained in https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/459

How much of that is auto-generated and pre-existing C code though? My dusty recollection from a while ago is that most of Tectonic's development is in Rust. It looks like the fork is trying to get rid of all the remaining C code?

Here is the percentages of different languages in the original tectonic repo: C: 80.5%, TeX: 7.8%, Rust 7.5%, C++ 4.0%, Other 0.2%

And here is the forked version: Rust 85.2%, TeX 7.3%, C 6.2%, C++ 1.2%, Shell 0.1%

So, looks like %80 more rust in this one (auto-generated and refactored)

That fork is quite curious, it seems like they've really gone out and created quite an active little fork, but haven't spent the time to explain what is different and interesting about their fork in the readme.

The about summarizes it:

> Experimental Oxidization of Tectonic the TeX/LaTeX engine.

Does "oxidization" mean "a port to the rust language" ?

Yes, "oxidation" as in "rusting" as in "converting to rust". It's a bit of fun wordplay. :)

...but it's forked from an existing Rust port of Latex.

That's the bit that intrigues me; what is the difference between this port and the original?

If seems to me that upstream is C. https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/

O'rly?

https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/blob/master...

It seems you're linking to wrappers to the underlying https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/tree/master...

As I understand/recall - the intention was always to be a rust rewrite; the starting point was 'let's take all the C and wrap it in `unsafe`'.

The issue linked up-thread introduces this fork (~ a year ago) titling it '[convert to rust] everything' (emphasis mine), and going on to talk about 'pure rust' (again).

I think the main repo's issue at least would've been a clearer submission than the fork; I initially had the same reaction as above.

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