The problem with slug is not that it isn't open source, it's that it's patent encumbered[1]. If it weren't for the patents, it'd be possible to implement an ope

The problem with slug is not that it isn't open source, it's that it's patent encumbered[1]. If it weren't for the patents, it'd be possible to implement an open source version. For font rendering, there are a lot of existing techniques out there, but whichever is best depends on your requirements. There are no silver bullets, and slug certainly isn't one. I will say though that most applications probably don't need hardware accelerated font rendering. A software renderer like Freetype2 is going to offer much higher quality results than anything like slug ever could, and with proper caching you can achieve good realtime performance. For a real world example of a text-heavy application that does this, see Lite-XL[2] 1: The landing page doesn't even mention the word "patent", so here's some evidence: https://twitter.com/ericlengyel/status/1159917092331642880?lang=en https://twitter.com/ericlengyel/status/1159917092331642880?l... 2: https://lite-xl.com/ https://lite-xl.com/