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RustyBuzz is quite limited when compared with HarfBuzz. The Rust fonts scene also seems to lack the necessary momentum to drive things through. I’m not sure whether it’s because the Rust community is mostly interested in webtech or whether Rust itself makes it hard to solve such complex problems. But I don’t see the sands shifting in less than 10 years to come.

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>RustyBuzz is quite limited when compared with HarfBuzz.

As the main author of rustybuzz I'm surprised to hear this. If you need a text shaper, rustybuzz is mostly a drop-in replacement for harfbuzz.

Text shaping and TrueType parsing are hard problems, but Rust does not make them more complicated. Quite the opposite. In fact, rustybuzz is written in 100% safe Rust. I would even go further and say that Rust is the only sane option for solving text-related tasks.

I can't quite see why Rust would make it harder, it's always a breeze compared to working on C++ projects, especially as the project matures. The compiler catches a lot of issues early, which otherwise slow down C++ projects as they accumulate silently, because they should have fixed all warnings, should have used ASan, TSan, MSan, religiously, and should have agreed on a manageable subset of C++, ... but of course didn't.

But I think the power of legacy and a bigger community is not to be underestimated.

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