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Comment by vsbuffalo | Hacker News Reader

TeX reminds me of GCC — huge, complex codebase, unhelpful error messages, and designed to just be a compiler/typesetter. I wish someone were to rewrite an LLVM-like TeX system. Simpler code, could be used to write libraries to do live syntax checking and formatting, beautiful error messages, and fast typesetting times.

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I don't know of any complete rewrites, but there are some cleanup/extension efforts underway, which are increasingly displacing "classic" TeX. The pdfTeX / LuaTeX line is probably the most actively developed codebase. It's 100% C now (no more Pascal or WEB code), and supports modern things like UTF-8 input, the lack of which was one of the more frequent pain points of trying to use classic TeX today.

> and supports modern things like UTF-8 input

Speaking of plain TeX:

Yes, they support UTF-8; that is, support it with a command-line switch which is a bit tricky to use. It's not like TeX can detect the encoding of your file and set things up automatically.

GCC is on par with LLVM performance-wise, and, as of the latest version, has those "beautiful" messages as well.

Do you have a reference for that statement? Does LLVM support the C++11 standard? And does it support OpenMP?

http://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html

http://clang-omp.github.io/#status

About the error messages in GCC 4.8: http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/ClangDiagnosticsComparison

The core of TeX (written by Knuth) is actually quite small for what it does - approximately 24kLOC when translated from Pascal to C. The "TeX systems" that are around today are huge because of all the other things that dwarf it, and honestly I don't think everyone needs all or even a majority of that - I know that the parts of TeX that I use to turn a .tex into a .ps can fit on a single floppy.

There's also the fact that LaTeX is often bundled in, and that is another "monstrosity" in itself. (I exclusively use plain TeX, so I have no need for that either.)

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKaI78K_rgA

I've been wanting to look at TeXmacs for a while now. It seems to have similar typesetting abilities as TeX, but the ability to edit the document live and connect with a running program. I haven't had the time to look into it, though, so it may not be what you want.

Texmacs is quite nice actually. If you know emacs shortcuts and are willing to learn a few new Texmacs specific ones it is the fastest way I know to write mixed text and maths.

When I tried last time a few years ago it was not as complete as LaTeX is, atleast for me, who is much more proficient in LaTex.

TeXworks is a simple GUI for editing *TeX, and watching the output at the same time:

https://www.tug.org/texworks/

You can also click somewhere in the PDF view and 'jump to source'. Used it a few times when polishing/debugging a LaTeX document, I generally don't use it for writing though. (I prefer to do all my writing in Vim).

I've seen TeXworks, but it's different than TeXmacs, which is real WYSIWYG editing with a TeX-like layout engine. TeXworks is still very cool, though.

> real WYSIWYG editing

That's an argument against using it, it seems to me. Having the words jump around as you type them is maddening.

Actually the error messages are really helpful, I wish compilers were that good.

BADNESS 10000

I just got an error message pointing to an aux file, which was automatically generated and had nothing to do with me. Yeah, the error messages are super helpful.

In my experience the TeX engine has decent error messages. The LaTeX set of macros, however, do not. What happens is that LaTeX doesn't do as much error checkout at its higher level of abstraction and leaves TeX to sort it out. TeX's errors are correct but tend to refer to the lowest level of code—the least helpful pointer for the reader. It's akin to the error messages you see from a C++ compiler about template functions.

"When 36 years old your code is, look as good it will not ehh."

Lets see you do it.

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