Comment by argee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by argee | Hacker News Reader

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Your FAQ says:

    Why not Typst?

    Typst is excellent for authored documents and produces beautiful output. It is also a Rust binary. You cannot import it into a Node process, run it in a browser, deploy it to a Cloudflare Worker, or call it as a library from a TypeScript application. If you need a layout engine embedded in a JS or TS runtime, Typst is not available to you.

So, wouldn't porting VMPrint to Rust make it such that Typst is the clear winner? Or is there something else missing?

VMPrint was a document pipeline and indeed somewhat crossed path with Typst, but I’ve since carved out its engine module, stripped away all dependencies so it's a pure math engine now that can be used anywhere.

My first experiment was to wrap it in a set of APIs called Layoutmaster. They work natively with the browser’s text systems to bypass DOM overflow. It was very fast... faster than the browser in many cases. This made me wonder if it would be faster in Rust so I made a port just for fun.

Turns out, the TS version was fast -- over a thousand pages per second, but the Rust version is quite a bit faster. It's still not fully optimized though. Still working on it.

I have no intention to use it for document generation unless there is a demand for it. For now I’m more interested in how this native engine can help with frontend jobs like creating a native live-editing surface without a browser.

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