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I too have recently been interested in TeX and Rust. Apart from Tectonic (wrapper around XeTeX and dvipdfmx) and the attempt to rewrite it in Rust (your first l
by lahcim8 5y ago
I too have recently been interested in TeX and Rust. Apart from Tectonic (wrapper around XeTeX and dvipdfmx) and the attempt to rewrite it in Rust (your first link), I also found [1], an attempt to rewrite TeX itself in Rust. I also understand that you are a supporter of the Tectonic in Rust effort, so hopefully you can fill me in on the current progress.
At first I though that just rewriting XeTeX/dvipdfmx in Rust just for sake of being written in Rust was foolish, because of TeX's untypical memory model. Also because of the manual translation using c2rust (also on C code generated from Pascal code that uses a lot of macros).
But after lookin at it now it seems that the rewrite progressed and the result are parts looking very Rusty, which is nice.
I too had ideas about TeX in Rust, but I think that starting with LuaTeX would be much more beneficial. Apart from LuaTeX having obvious support of scripting in Lua and being very extensible, XeTeX has other disadvantages. See for example [2], which still in my opinion misses many internal differences, where LuaTeX is much superior.
Do you have any tips on how to join the Tectonic / TeX in Rust community? Where can I potentially discuss my foolish TeX/Rust ideas, being very new to Rust?
[1] https://github.com/crlf0710/tex-rs https://github.com/crlf0710/tex-rs
[2] https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/593217/125126 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/593217/125126
- xvilka 5y agoThey have a forum but now discuss the switch to GitHub Discussions[1]. The issue about oxidizing everything is here[2]. If you want to help the project there is a number of issues[3] that can be done, in particular syncronization with the Tectonic mainline and XeTeX code update[4] [1] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/766 https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/766 [2] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/459 https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/459 [3] https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/issues https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/issues [4] https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/issues/299 https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic/issues/299
- lahcim8 5y agoThank you for the pointers. I will try to get involved, unfortunately I won't have much time for it in the near future.