bstr VS book

Libraries for a lot of this stuff exist (albeit in many cases not very mature yet):

- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text does text layout (which Taffy explicitly considers out of scope)

- https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit does accessibility

- https://github.com/servo/rust-cssparser does value-agnostic CSS parsing (it will parse the general syntax but leaves value parsing up to the user, meaning you can easily add support for whatever properties you what). Libraries like https://github.com/parcel-bundler/lightningcss implement parsing for the standard css properties.

- There are crates like https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr and https://docs.rs/wtf8/latest/wtf8/ for working with non-unicode text

We are planning to add a C API to Taffy, but tbh I feel like C is not very good for this kind of modularised approach. You really want to be able to expose complex APIs with enforced type safety and this isn't possible with C.

As the author of bstr and also the regex implementation that bstr uses to implement word breaking, it is linear time.

NSFL: https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr/blob/86947727666d7b21c97e...

OsStr uses WTF-8 on Windows, and just represents the raw underlying bytes on Unix.

Byte strings can be WTF-8. They can be anything. The problem is that there is no real way to (easily) get the underlying WTF-8 bytes of an OsStr on Windows. So there's no free conversion to and from byte strings.

I wrote more about this in the bstr docs (and don't miss the link to os_str_bytes): https://docs.rs/bstr/latest/bstr/#file-paths-and-os-strings

I'd be happy to answer more questions if you have them. :-) https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr/discussions

Check out bstr, which does this exact thing for its BString and BStr types.

Currently slated for next Monday: https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr/issues/40

This is just an FYI. I don't mean to say much to your overall point, although, as someone else who has spent a lot of time doing Unicode-y things, I do tend to agree with you. I had a very similar discussion a bit ago.[1]

Putting that aside, at least with respect to grapheme segmentation, it might be a little simpler than you think. But maybe only a little. The unicode-segmentation crate also does word segmentation, which is quite a bit more complicated than grapheme segmentation. For example, you can write a regex to parse graphemes without too much fuss[2]. (Compare that with the word segmentation regex, much to my chagrin.[3]) Once you build the regex, actually using it is basically as simple as running the regex.[4]

Sadly, not all regex engines will be able to parse that regex due to its use of somewhat obscure Unicode properties. But the Rust regex crate can. :-)

And of course, this somewhat shifts code size to heap size. So there's that too. But bottom line is, if you have a nice regex engine available to you, you can whip up a grapheme segmenter pretty quickly. And some regex engines even have grapheme segmentation built in via \X.

[1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/aho-corasick/issues/72

[2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr/blob/e38e7a7ca986f9499b30...

[3]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr/blob/e38e7a7ca986f9499b30...

[4]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/bstr/blob/e38e7a7ca986f9499b30...

This is a great idea. I realize the find implementation is not ideal and have considered bringing in an optional dependency to improve performance. I remembered bstr using two-way search, so I was wondering if depending on the full crate for searching would be worthwhile, but I see that changed. Thanks for the tip!

Fun little nit-pick that does not detract from your overall point: you can actually count graphemes with a regex and that's exactly what bstr does. :-)

My first port of call was to google learn rust which lead me to "the book". The book is a first steps guide written by the rust community for newbies (or Rustlings as they're called) to gain a 'solid grasp of the language'.

Before Prodzilla, I’d read 'The Book' a couple of times, and had made my way through Rustlings, but hadn’t yet built a serious project in Rust.

To answer your last question;

Start with the Rust book.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

Then do Rustlings until the syntax becomes muscle memory.

Then join the Discord and start doing little projects.

You won’t get up to the proficiency of other languages as quickly in Rust. It takes longer. For me it’s taking a lot longer, but I enjoy it.

Before diving into these repositories, familiarize yourself with Rust and its development ecosystem. The official Rust book is an excellent resource for developers at all levels. Each repository has documentation on how to contribute, covering code style, issue tracking, and pull requests.

This is my third Rust book after the official book and Rust in Action. The other two books are great, but they were too theoretical for me. I'm a slow learner and had much trouble grokking Rust's features and idiosyncrasies. When I was done with these books, I was lost and unsure of what I could do.

It's the same reason everything digital and downloadable isn't free: there's a cost to create it and there's a value to it.

For a language developer to charge for a book about that language, I think that's a completely valid way to make some money off of their work.

Even the Rust book, "The Rust Programming Language" is available freely online [0], but also as a print and ebook for sale via NoStarchPress [1].

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

[1] https://nostarch.com/rust-programming-language-2nd-edition

You know you can just read it online right now in 2 different variants It does contain some systems programming.

I am looking at The Book (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/), but hoped there was an amazing person on youtube.

Yeah, I'll build something, finally trying webassembly.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/