Memory safety for web fonts
developer.chrome.com
developer.chrome.com
I like this way of measuring extra work. Is this standard at Google?
The main economic unit for most engineers is FTE not $.
“The cost of one full-time employee is equivalent to X CPUs.” —> “The full-time equivalent is X CPUs.”
as for if you can compare multidimensional quantities - of course you can do it and it is done every day with engineering and medical data, it's just tad more complicated than adding and multiplying so it's a no-go for c-suite
you cannot expect people earning six figures to understand actual math, can you?
And there are internal calculators that tell you how much CPU, memory, network etc a SWE-year gets you. Same for other internal units, like the cost of a particular DB.
This allows you to make time/resource tradeoffs. Spending half an engineer’s year to save 0.5 SWE-y of CPU is not a great ROI. But if you get 10 SWE out of it, it’s probably a great idea.
I personally have used it to argue that we shouldn’t spend 2 weeks of engineering time to save a TB of DB disk space. The cost of the disk comes to less than a SWE-hour per year!
An example being Google unilaterally flipping on VP8/VP9 decode, which at that time purely decoded on the CPU or experimentally on the GPU.
It saved Google a few CPU cycles and some bandwidth but it nuked every user's CPU and battery. And the amount of energy YouTube consumed wholesale (so servers + clients) skyrocketed. Tragedy of the Commons.
It's been a long time since I've seen a VP8 video on YT, so I'd assume it's not even used anymore due to worse compression.
https://www.osnews.com/story/24263/google-h264-stifles-innov...
What this meant in practice was that Firefox would play YouTube videos at close to 100% CPU and Chrome would use H.264 and play at like 5% CPU, and since it was VP8 the quality was noticeably worse than H.264 as well. Regular people talked about that a lot, and it helped establish Chrome’s reputation for being faster.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. If there was something outside of stupidity, zealotry would be another one. Although I guess one could argue zealotry is also a form of stupidity.
On the whole, since clients are so constrained, it usually pays to be efficient there - make websites load quickly to increase revenue, require only weak hardware to get more game/app sales, etc. Clients are also untrusted, so there's so many things you can only do on the backend.
Implementing VP9, enabling it, transcoding videos and testing it COST SWE hours, it didn't save them. It also cost resources.
In what way did you envision the VP9 issue being related to SWE/resource hour computations here?
But from the larger point of view of "everyone," this actually made the total cost worse. The cost/benefit analysis from Google's point-of-view was worth it, even though it made things overall worse in the larger perspective. Hence "tragedy of the commons," where the short-sighted behavior of some actors makes things worse overall.
In case of VP9, there was no such tradeoff - it used more storage, more CPU time and age SWE hours. What it saved was a very clearly quantifiable financial cost of bandwidth and SWE hour tradeoff didn't have much to do with it.
It would be applicable if the debate would be investing engineering time to speed up VP9 encoder for example.
There's a few benefits over just using a dollar figure. It's a unit that natural ties time to value. SWE-years is a natural unit for thinking about the time of SWEs. It's also convertible to other units. The conversion factors to other units can change over time, without having to pay attention to the minutiae.
All these factors make it useful for both measuring ongoing cost and making investment tradeoffs.
Windows/macOS don't seem to have a way to enable proper hinting anymore [0], and even FreeType (since 2.7 [1]) defaults to improper hinting (they call it "subpixel hinting", which doesn't make sense to me in theory, and practically still seems blurry, as if it's unhinted).
In case anyone's wondering what properly hinted text looks like, here's a screenshot [2]. This currently relies on setting the environment variable `FREETYPE_PROPERTIES=truetype:interpreter-version=35`, possibly some other configuration through fontconfig, and using a font with good hinting instructions (eg, DejaVu Sans and DejaVu Sans Mono in the screenshot).
My suspicion is that Windows moved away from font hinting after XP because it's very hard to create fonts with good sets of hinting instructions (aiui, OTF effectively only allows something like "autohinting"), so in the modern world of designer fonts it's easier to just have everyone look at blurry text. Some other minor reasons would be that UI scaling in Windows sometimes (or always?) introduces blurring anyway, and viewing raster images on screens of varying resolutions also introduces scaling blur.
[0] Windows still has a way to enable it, but it disables antialiasing at the same time. This is using an option called "Smooth edges of screen fonts" in "Performance Options"). This basically makes it look like XP, which imo is an improvement, but not as good as FreeType which can do hinting and antialiasing at the same time.
[1] https://freetype.org/freetype2/docs/hinting/subpixel-hinting...
[2] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Maxdamantus/3a58d8e764b29...
I'm hoping (but not sure) Skrifa will support hinting (though I'm not sure how it interacts with fontconfig). I noticed your screenshot uses full hinting (a subjective choice I currently don't use on my machines), presumably with integer glyph positioning/advance which isn't scale-independent (neither is Windows GDI), though this is quite a nonstandard configuration IMO.
That said, one of the horrors of using the old font stacks, and in many ways the very thing that drove me away from fighting Linux desktop configurations for now about 10y of freedom from pain, was dealing with other related disasters. First it's a fight to even get to things being consistent, and as seen in your screenshot there's inconsistency between the content renders, the title, and the address bar. Worse though the kerning in `Yes` in your screenshot is just too bad for constant use for me.
I hope as we usher in a new generation of font tech, that we can finally reach consistency. I really want to see these engines used on Windows and macOS as well, where they're currently only used as fall-back, because I want them to present extremely high quality results on all platforms, and then I can use them in desktop app work and stop having constant fights with these subsystems. I'm fed up with it after many decades, I just want to be able to recommend a solution that works and have those slowly become the consistently correct output for everyone everywhere.
Maybe if what freetype is pushing for (fonts are WASM binaries) continues to take hold, and encompass more of fonts, we'll find more consistency over time though
I'm not an expert, but - I'm sorry, it's not.
The point of hinting is to change the shape of the glyphs so the rasterized result looks "better". What "better" is, of course, purely subjective, but most people would agree that it's better when perceived thicknesses of strokes and gaps are uniform, and the text is less blurry, so the eye can discern the shapes faster. I don't think that your rendering scores high points in that regard.
I'll take a phrase from your rendering: "it usually pays" [0]. I don't like it, I'm sorry. The hinter can't make up its mind if the stroke width should be two pixels wide, or three pixels with faint pixels on the sides and an intense one in the center - therefore, the perceived thicknesses vary, which increases eye strain; "l"s are noticeably different; "ys" at the end clumped together into one blurry thing; and there's a completely unnecessary line of faint pixels on the bottom of the characters, which hinting should have prevented.
The second line is how it looks on Windows on 150% scale. Verdana is a different font, so it's an unfair comparison (Verdana was designed specifically to look good on low resolutions), and the rainbows can be off-putting, but I still think the hinter tucks the shapes into pixels better.
Maybe I don't understand something, or maybe there's a mistake.
Here's an updated version of your image, with the actual pixel data from my image copied in, at 8x and 1x scale [0]. It should be possible to see the pixels yourself if you load it into a tool like GIMP, which preserves pixels as you zoom in.
It should be fairly clear from the image above that the hinting causes the outlines (particularly, horizontal and vertical lines) to align to the pixel grid, which, as you say, both makes the line widths uniform and makes the text less blurry (by reducing the need for antialiasing; SSAA is basically the gold standard for antialiasing, which involves rendering at a higher resolution and then downscaling, meaning a single physical pixel corresponds to an average of multiple pixels from the original image).
Out of interest, I've done a bit of processing [1] to your image to see what ClearType is actually doing [2], and as described in the FreeType post I linked, it seems like it is indeed using vertical hints (so the horizontal lines don't have the colours next to them—this is obvious from your picture), and it seems like it is indeed ignoring any horizontal hints, since the grey levels around the vertical lines are inconsistent, and the image still looks horizontally blurry.
I might as well also link to this demo I started putting together a few years ago [3]. It uses FreeType to render with hinting within the browser, and it should handle different DPIs as long as `devicePixelRatio` is correct. I think this should work on desktop browsers as long as they're scaling aware (I think this is the case with UI scaling on Windows but not on macOS). Mobile browsers tend to give nonsense values here since they don't want to change it as the user zooms in/out. Since it's using FreeType alone without something like HarfBuzz, maybe some of the positioning is not optimal.
[0] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Maxdamantus/3a58d8e764b29...
[1] After jiggling the image around and converting it back from 8x to 1x, I used this command to show each RGB subpixel in greyscale (assuming the typical R-G-B pixel layout used on LCD computer monitors):
width=137; height=53; stream /tmp/image_1x.png - | xxd -p | sed 's/../&&&/g' | xxd -r -p | convert -size $((width*3))x$((height)) -depth 8 rgb:- -interpolate nearest-neighbor -interpolative-resize $((100*8))%x$((300*8))% /tmp/image_8x_rgb.png
Gosh, you are right, I'm so sorry, it really was my PC. Yes, it really is much nicer once I looked at the real pixels of your screenshot. Thank you for the answer.
Admittedly I haven't looked into how the setup is configured, and haven't tried it in Chrome, so maybe it's still possible to enable full hinting as intended by the font somehow.
[0] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Maxdamantus/3a58d8e764b29...
[1] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Maxdamantus/3a58d8e764b29...
EDIT: looking into the FreeType code, it looks like the v35 mode turns on the `NO_SUBPIXEL_HINTING` flag [0], which might have also been ported over to skrifa [1]? Though there are "(always enabled)" comments throughout the code suggesting that it can't be configured.
Maybe later I'll try forcing the option and see what happens.
[0] https://github.com/freetype/freetype/blob/5d4e649f740c675426...
[1] https://github.com/googlefonts/fontations/blob/f808570ce1939...
You don't have to do the Big Rewrite™, you can simply migrate components one by one instead.
Go is also memory safe.
PS. Note that unlike most languages, a datarace on something like an int in go isn't undefined behavior, just non-deterministic and discouraged.
For anyone not familiar with this, see https://go.dev/ref/mem#restrictions
Incidentally, Java is very similar: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se8/html/jls-17.htm...
I called out the types I did in my post specifically because they're the types where data races can result in arbitrary memory corruption (in the actual implementation, the spec is arguably not even that strict). Per https://go.dev/ref/mem#restrictions (the same linke as in Steve's reply to me)
It can result in stack overflows, infinite loops, but not in memory corruption.
That's not the case for Go, it's trivially easy to create memory corruption with multiple threads there.
By contrast, in Go, all it takes to cause full-blown undefined behavior, in the same sense as C or C++ or Rust, is accessing an interface/map/slice value in a racy way, not having the race detector on, and being sufficiently unlucky.
I agree that in practice this doesn't stop people from calling Go a memory-safe language. I think it's reasonable to argue that this statement is just wrong. That said, I think the Carbon people once said something along the lines of, in their experience, it's rare in practice for memory corruption bugs in C++ to be caused solely by data races. So a language that's memory-safe in single-threaded contexts, but where concurrency is not memory-safe, is "good enough". Maybe it's the same in Go.
I am still suspicious of this, though. Maybe it's just that concurrent operations are rarer in general because they're so famously hard to get right, and this makes it less likely that you'll have one that's exactly the right kind of wrong to cause memory corruption. Certainly it seems at odds with the notion that you want the exceptions to memory safety to be auditable.
> By contrast, in Go, all it takes to cause full-blown undefined behavior, in the same sense as C or C++ or Rust
It's a little more tricky than that. UB in C/C++/Rust is something that the compiler can use to transform the code. This can lead to other issues. Go's compiler will not do those kinds of things. So on one hand, yes, it can lead to arbitrary Bad Things, but on the other hand, it is different.
> Maybe it's the same in Go.
I was having a discussion about this topic last week, regarding Uber's paper from a few years back trying to analyze the prevalence of these issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43336293 You'll notice the person replying to me has pointed out some additional mitigations that have happened since.
We've witnessed memory corruption events (from plain go code), and it's raised real concerns even among our strongest advocates. Our most recent case was actually a false-positive, in that there was a real race on a map, but it so happened it would never have reached a data race - still it tore down a process in production, and this is good and bad on multiple fronts. It doesn't make the solution invalid, and no one should be throwing internet punches over it, but it's absolutely reasonable to be concerned about memory corruption cases in complex go programs. In general my advice for Go usage is to write small programs with low concurrency and small heaps, this manages associated risks well, both in terms of authorship and exposure when events come up. Small container sized things are probably fine, essentially, but many tens of gb of user data in heaps with hundreds of constantly changed kloc is a place to be genuinely concerned.
Reflecting back on the starting context, and this advice, they align. The compiler has no high value user data to corrupt, if it suffers memory corruption the bad cases have to be pretty lucky not to end up in sufficiently total failure as to cause true end user problems. The runtime is short lived and compartmentalized, and it's not in a highly adversarial environment - this is a fine fitting use case. In an attacker heavy situation like the font system though, essentially I'm almost ready to drop maybe one layer of sandboxing once it's implemented with stronger guarantees and had some appropriate testing. I'm not sure I'd be ready to say that with less safety guarantees.
Go's compiler is notorious for choosing to compile quickly rather than optimize code.
But is that true of gccgo?
Data races on those pointer-like objects are undefined behavior in Go, whereas there isn't something comparable in Java. The reason why Go is considered a memory safe language is actually pretty mundane: it's simply that the data race issues are pretty hard to exploit in practice for a variety of reasons.
AIUi
Memory model strength has nothing to do with tearing. Total store order and total load order does not matter in any possible way.
There's no tearing, because all memory operations are wider than 64-bits. Unless someone purposefully performs two 32-bit operations on a single 64-bit value.
My understanding is that Microsoft chose Go precisely to avoid having to do a full rewrite. Of all the “modern” native/AoT compiled languages (Rust, Swift, Go, Zig) Go has the most straightforward 1:1 mapping in semantics with the original TypeScript/JavaScript, so that a tool-assisted translation of the whole codebase is feasible with bug-for-bug compatibility, and minimal support/utility code.
It would be of course _possible_ to port/translate it to any language (Including Rust) but you would essentially end up implementing a small JavaScript runtime and GC, with none or very little of the safety guarantees provided by Rust. (Rust's ownership model generally favors drastically different architectures.)
It was about being able to have two codebases (old and new) that are so structurally similar, that it won't be a big deal to keep updating both
A Go port looks roughly the same as TypeScript, same “shape”, same concepts, so they don’t need to re-architect the code, they can just “translate” TypeScript to Go, then clean up where makes sense or needed. For a good while (definitely years, probably half a decade, if you ask me) while both projects are maintained, adding fixes and features will be therefore easy. The two codebases can be expected to have almost the same output and bugs, both is good for maintainability.
With Rust, the translation wouldn’t work as Rust is significantly different. This would mean rethinking everything, the architecture would diverge, resulting in two possibly very different set of bugs. With different structure, tweaking both at the same would be very difficult.
In entirely unrelated news, I think Chrome should totally switch engines from V8 to a Rust built one, like hmm... our / my Nova JavaScript engine! j/k
Great stuff on the font front, thank you for the articles, Rust/C++ interop work, and keep it up!
Skia is made in C++. It's made by Google.
There's FreeType. It actually measures and renders glyphs, simultaneously supporting various antialiasing modes, hinting, kerning, interpreting TrueType bytecode and other things.
FreeType is made in C. It's not made by Google.
Question: why was it FreeType that got a Rust rewrite first?
But I don't really know anything about how all the parts fit together; just speculating.
Skia tendrils run deep and leak all over the place.
There's also a different set of work to invest in, next-generation Skia is likely to look quite different, moving much of the work on to the GPU, and this work is being researched and developed: https://github.com/linebender/vello. Some presentations about this work too: https://youtu.be/mmW_RbTyj8c https://youtu.be/OvfNipIcRiQ
Some third-party tools exist to tweak how ClearType works, like MacType[1] or Better ClearType Tuner[2]. Unfortunately, these tools don't work in Chrome/electron, which seems to implement its own font rendering. Reading this, I guess that's through FreeType.
I hope that as new panel technologies start becoming more prevalent, that somebody takes the initiative to help define a standard for communicating subpixel layouts from displays to the graphics layer, which text (or graphics) rendering engines can then make use of to improve type hinting. I do see some efforts in that area from Blur Busters[3] (the UFO Test guy), but still not much recognition from vendors.
Note I'm still learning about this topic, so please let me know if I'm mistaken about any points here.
[1] https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype
That being the case, it may end up being that in the near future, alternative arrangements end up being abandoned and become one of the many quirky “stepping stone” technologies that litter display technology history. While it’s still a good idea to support them better in software, that might put into context why there hasn’t been more efforts put into doing so.
“Whole pixel/grayscale antialiasing” should be enough and then specialized display controller would handle the rest
Personally I don't bother anymore anyway since I have a HiDPI display (about 200dpi, 4K@24"). I think that's a better solution, simply have enough pixels to look smooth. It's what phones do too of course.
Windows I believe still uses RGB subpixel AA, because OLED monitor users still need to tweak ClearType settings to make text not look bad.
That is not true. Apple still sells Macs that don't come with a screen, namely Mac Mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro. People use these with non-HiDPI monitors they already own all the time.
You're right that there's nothing stopping someone from hooking up an HDMI-to-VGA adapter for their 22" Trinitron from 2001, but that doesn't mean boat anchors are a meaningful market segment. It's not a consideration for why they should retain a font rendering feature for a modern OS. You're just going to have to suffer with fuzzy fonts for your retrogaming hobby.
So what is the "configuration they sell" for the desktop Macs? The Studio Display that costs way too much for what it is, so to no one's surprise, they're not selling all that many of those? Or the Pro Display XDR for which the stand alone costs more than an entry-level Mac Mini? Sure no one will buy a $1600 monitor to use with their $600 Mac Mini. They'll get a much cheaper third-party 2K one.
My impressions based on limited anecdotal data I've is that most people with mac mini are using it as their secondary device (everyone has a Macbooks). Everyone is using 27" 4k monitors. 4k monitors are not that far from 2k monitors, and I think most people who are preferring to buy 2k are gamers that want higher refresh rate that their GPU can support at 2k. But gamers are not using Mac's anyway.
My 34” monitor is only 4K but is “retina” at the viewing distance in my home office according to this calculator: https://qasimk.io/screen-ppd/
You can separately purchase whatever monitor you wish. There are now plenty of 27" 5K monitors out there. Asus, LG (for now), Viewsonic, Kuycon, others I'm probably forgetting. They're expensive as far as monitors go, but not as expensive as the Studio Display.
If you want a 2k monitor you can buy one and hook it up, but Apple isn't interested in making it look good. It's a not new decision, either. They stopped selling Macbooks without Retina displays in 2016. They haven't supported 2k scaling since the M1 Mac Mini over 5 years ago: https://www.macworld.com/article/549493/how-to-m1-mac-1440p-...
Apple is not a budget vendor. They're a premium vendor. That's not just what other people call them. It's what they themselves profess to be. That's why you can get an Apple Thunderbolt cable for $70. To Apple, if you buy a Mac Mini, yes they're expecting you to hook it up to a 4k monitor. They expect you to be getting a Mac Mini because you want a Mac, not because you can't afford a Macbook.
The problem with 27" 4K monitors is that you can't have integer scaling on them. If you set the scaling factor to 1x, everything will be too small, if you set it to 2x, everything will be huge, and macOS can't properly do fractional scaling because what it actually does is render everything into a 2x framebuffer and downscale that for output.
And besides, only supporting HiDPI displays doesn't mean one can stop striving for pixel perfection. I hate SF Symbols icons because they're sizeless. They're an abhorrent blurry mess on my monitor but they're also not all that sharp on the MacBook screen. If you notice it once, it'll haunt you forever. Sorry. They do look fine-ish on iPhones though because those use OLED displays that lack the notion of a pixel grid anyway.
Why don’t they produce 5K/6K monitors that allow for 2x integer scaling? The $1,600 Studio Display is only $1,600 because it has no competition.
Because 5K panels are probably more expensive to produce than 4K ones, and because that would only benefit Mac users since Windows can do fractional scaling just fine. I'm not sure about that but it might also be that not all GPUs used in PCs can drive monitors larger than 4K.
It’s one of the chief complaints I have with one of my mostly otherwise good x86 laptops. The 1.5x scaling the display needs has been a pain point on multiple occasions.
Where it falls apart is at densities any lower, for example it struggles on those awful 1366x768 15.6” panels that it seemed like every other laptop was built with for a while. Similarly 24” 1080p and 32” 2560x1440 are pretty bad.
Or it could have been the DirectWrite thing. I just don't remember where I read it.
I always thought cleartype was ugly by the way.
Subpixel text rendering was removed from MacOS some time ago, though, presumably because they decided it was not needed on retina screens. Maybe you're thinking of that?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType#ClearType_in_DirectW...
Pretty sure phones do grayscale AA.
But it only applies to Linux, where the small fonts can be made look crisp this way. Windows AA is worse, small fonts are a bit more blurred on the same screen, and amcOS is the worst: connecting a 24" FHD screen to an MBP ives really horrible font rendering, unless you make fonts really large. I suppose it's because macOS does not do subpxel AA at all, and assumes high DPI screens only.
It’s G’s _business_ folks (ie, C-level executives) that I have no respect for. Their business model of exploiting users is just awful.
(in reality Google is investing a lot of effort into automating the FFI layer to make it safer and less tedious)
Are font formats so bad that the files need to be sanitized?
Also, note that the identified integer overflows as one of causes of vulnerabilities. It is sad that today many languages do not detect overflows, and even modern architectures like RISC-V do not include overflow traps although detecting an overflow doesn't require many logic gates. C is old, ok, but why new languages like Rust do not have overflow traps, I cannot understand. Don't Rust developers know about this thing?
It is not just "easy" to do, but actually easy to do, without quotes.
And much, much easier than as an exception/trap.
And it is explicit, which makes it even better. No hidden behaviour.
> it is explicit, which makes it even better. No hidden behaviour.
Which is why we do virtual address translation and populate (and evict!) L1/L2 caches in software, and the reason why CHERI project is misguided.
I once had to reverse engineer (extract the spec from the code) a C++ function that was hundreds of lines long. I have had to fix a Python function over a thousand lines long.
I am sure the people who wrote that code will find ways to make life difficult with Rust too, but I cannot regret having one less sharp knife in their hands.
It can be, if the composition is itself sound. That's a key part of Rust's value proposition: individually safe abstractions in Rust also compose safely.
The problem in C isn't that you can't write safe C but that the composition of individually safe C components is much harder to make safe.
It can't. You can make yourself 99.9...% confident that it's correct. Then you compose it with some other functions that you're 99.9...% about, and you now have a new function that you are slightly less confident in. And you compose that function with other functions to get a function that you're slightly less confident in. And you compose them all together to get a complete program that you wouldn't trust to take a dollar to the store to buy gum.
Concidering Rust is just tooling and coding practice in front of LLVM IR does this statement not also include Rust? There are in fact formally verified C and C++ programs, does that formal verification also count as tooling and coding practice and therefore not apply?
If either of the above is true why does it matter at all?
I am specifically calling out your blanket statement and want to open uo discussion about it because at present your implied point was it is impossible to write safe code in C/C++ and it is only possible in Rust, however the very point you made would also apply to Rust.
There are also non-safety issues that may affect the integrity of a program. I recently again looked into Rust, haven't given up just yet but to just instantiate a WGPU project the amount of incidental complexity is mind boggling. I haven't explored OpenGL but concidering that the unofficial webgpu guide for rust [1] recommends using an older version of winit because the current version would require significant rewrites due to API changes is not encouraging. Never mind the massive incidental complexity of needing an async runtime for webgpu itself, is this a pattern I am going to see in different parts of Rust. Rust already has enough complexity without injecting coroutines in places where blocking functions are reasonable.
Nobody cares about a CVE-free rendering library if it can’t render things correctly.
Or can admit themselves as fallible.
Or realize that even if they are near-infallible, that unless they've studied the C _and_ C++ standards to the finest detail they will probably unintentionally produce code at some point that the modern C++ compilers will manage to make vulnerable in the name of undefined behaviors optimizations (see the recent HN article about how modern C/C++ compilers has a tendency to turn fixed-time multiplications into variable time and vulnerable to timing attacks).
But of course, there is always tons of people that believe that they are better than the "average schmuck" and never produce vulnerable code.
Obviously a lot younger than Freetype.
It would also be a lot less important if we did not do silly things like loading fonts from random websites.
So though FreeType is carefully written w.r.t. correctness, it was not meant to deal with malicious input and that robustness is hard to put in afterwards.
[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freetype/freetype/
Of course, C++ offers you tools that C doesn't, but some of those tools have their own sharp edges as well. Plus, many C++ codebases are "C with classes" style or similar hybrids, those are still ultimately C++ programs, not C ones.
And that is the deal, lack of security culture.
1. bugs in new code
2. bugs in old code that have survived years of scrutiny
Their conclusion from this is that they're generally greenlighting Rust for new projects but not requiring a rewrite for old projects because they believe rewrites are likely to introduce new category-1 bugs (regardless of the target language). But new code always has category-1 bugs, so if they write it in Rust they cut down on the number of possible category-2 bugs thanks to the static constraints imposed by the type system.
I'm assuming the font module got rewritten into Rust because they planned to rewrite it period (i.e. their analysis suggests the current status quo of how it's built and maintained is generating too many bugs, and Google tends to be very NIH about third-party dependencies so their knee-jerk response would be "solve that by writing our own").
It's always better to get new memory-safe code in to replace old memory-unsafe code, when you can, but the prioritization here is a little more complex.
See comments under this video: https://youtu.be/gG4BJ23BFBE
We are all humans, and humans make mistakes. The obvious way to avoid mistakes is to formalize "correct code" and get code chekced by machines, and in this context, let the compiler guarantee the correctness. Anything else will never be as effective.
... then it's not all obvious anymore. In these situations you'd rather drop down to assembly than go up to sth like Rust.
I'm currently doing my 2nd take on a userspace allocator (fixed-size pages but of different sizes, running 32-bit too) as well probably my 8th take or so on a GUI toolkit. I've experimented with lots of approaches, but it always seems to come back to removing abstractions, because those seem to kill my work output. A big reason is they blow up code size and make code (by and large) less understandable, as well as harder to change because of the sheer size.
Not necessarily saying that approach doesn't lead to more potential security issues. I mostly just turn up warnings, not doing fuzzing etc. But it seems to be a more pragmatic way for me to achieve functioning (and robust-in-practice) software at all.
Which is why the video I linked is not so relevant to HFT guys, for example. (Context: some people try to use HFT as "counter example" to that video.) Let's be realistic -- nobody cares about whether your code running trading algorithms inside your company is memory safe.
Sillicon Valley devs clearly believe that machine translation is a magical technology that completely solved internationalization, like in Star Trek. No, it's far from it. Ever since internet has been flooded with automatically translated garbage, the experience of international users, at least bilingual ones, got much worse.
At the very least sites that do this should detect that there's a mismatch between expected language given geolocation and the header and have a toast notification about how to change the language settings back manually.
I'm trying to learn the language of the country I now live in. And yet, Google thinks they know better than me, my preference, at the moment.
And this preference is quite circumstantial, mind you.
If you're a global company it would be silly to assume all your readers speak/read a single language. AI translations (assuming that's what this is) are not perfect, but better than nothing.
I get how poor translation could be irritating for bilingual people who notice the quality difference though, but I guess you guys have the advantage of being able to switch the language.
This despite Google already knowing what languages I can read…
This is not a just Silicon Valley problem though; Redmond had similar issues if you just use the newer parts of Windows in a non-English language.
Worst still Google Maps will insist on only showing street names, area names, an directions in Swedish.
It might help if there was some way to play around with the APIs without having to wait so long for it to build. But as far as i know that's not currently possible.
edit: I'm actually not seeing the C FFI, looking at the library. It must be there somewhere, because it's being used from a C++ codebase. Can somebody point to the extern C use? I'm finding this inside that `fontations` repository:
> rg 'extern "'
fontations/fauntlet/src/font/freetype.rs
161:extern "C" fn ft_move_to(to: *const FT_Vector, user: *mut c_void) -> c_int {
168:extern "C" fn ft_line_to(to: *const FT_Vector, user: *mut c_void) -> c_int {
175:extern "C" fn ft_conic_to(
187:extern "C" fn ft_cubic_to(
>Its age is completely irrelevant other than as demonstration that it did what it set out to do, and still performs that job as intended for people who actually work on, and with fonts.
Where's the follow-up, or did you just walk away?
Sure, a compile-time option to use one or the other might sound reasonable, but then that's two different code paths that need to be maintained and tested. Are you willing to do that maintenance on an ongoing basis?
And can you be certain that switching to floating-point doesn't change the results of calculations in various ways that actually matter for rendering? Are you willing to put in the time to test that thoroughly?
Instead of engaging with the developer, you just ignored them and moved on. I certainly wouldn't want to merge a patch into one of my projects if it came from someone with your attitude.
No, that's why I will change to a better font rendering system when I get a chance.