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While the original TeX engine only get bug fixes these days, that's not really relevant for LaTeX since LaTeX doesn't even support that engine anymore. While pd

While the original TeX engine only get bug fixes these days, that's not really relevant for LaTeX since LaTeX doesn't even support that engine anymore. While pdfTeX development is rather slow too, it does still see feature development. That being said, for modern documents LuaTeX is really the only engine worth looking at and it is quite actively developed. Of course, it doesn't see much adaption but that problem will also appear for any new system.

dhosek 6y ago
That brings up the other big problem with contemporary TeX. LuaTeX has handfuls of subtle incompatibilities with pdfTeX and XeTeX (and a weird way of handling character setting at the low level where it maps characters to their index in the font file rather than unicode code points). It's also noticeably slower than XeTeX which is slower than pdfTeX. It would be nice if it were true that pdfTeX ⊆ XeTeX ⊆ luaTeX, but unfortunately, it's not.