geckoview VS harfbuzz

Warning, I don't really know what I am talking about on this subject. But that said! I believe the replacement is GeckoView

I stand by what I said - their code is a convulated mess by design. It's 25 years and they still haven't modularised their code that anyone can use the Gecko engine on the desktop and creating competing browsers. All anyone can do is create a clone of Firefox, which ofcourse, cannot really compete with Firefox or other desktop browser as it will still have all the flaws of Firefox. And this is what Mozilla wants.

They may have started with altruistic reasons, but after tasting Google's money, their greed corrupted them.

Mobile is a good example. Mozilla realised it was in a precarious position on the mobile platform, which is dominated by Chrome, Opera and Safari. And so they have now been forced to release the Gecko rendering engine for mobile ( https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview ) and are encouraging others to create mobile browsers, in the hopes that this may provide a fillip to Mobile Firefox. Desperation drove them to this move as the money is now in mobile platform (Google paying 15 billion dollars to Apple / Safari highlights this).

If they can do this for the mobile platform, why can't they do it for the Desktop platform too?

This kind of deliberate convulated code mess is like a "dark pattern" where in you know the developer isn't really interested in supporting the open source movement. Yes, there are many other open source projects that have poor code or lack documentation, but unlike the Firefox project, none of them has 100's of millions of dollars at their disposal - it's a travesty how they have wasted all that money!

For C/C++ projects that use meson as the build system, there is an excellent way to manage dependencies:

https://mesonbuild.com/Wrapdb-projects.html

https://mesonbuild.com/Wrap-dependency-system-manual.html

meson will download and build the libraries automatically and give you a variable which you pass as a regular dependency into the built target:

https://github.com/qemu/qemu/tree/005ad32358f12fe9313a4a0191...

https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/tree/main/subprojects

https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/blob/37457412b3212463c5...

Or, if you're using proper operating systems, they're managed by the usual package manager, just like everything else.

If you sympathize with the travails of people working on text rendering in applications, please consider supporting (among other projects):

1. The LibreOffice project (libreoffice.org), the free office application suite. This is where the rubber hits the road and developers deal with the extreme complexities of everything regarding text - shaping, styling, multi-object interaction, multi-language, you name it. And - they/we absolutely need donations to manage a project with > 200 million users: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate

2. harfbuzz (https://harfbuzz.github.io), and specifically Behdad Esfahood the main contributor. Although, TBH, I've not quite figured out whether you can donate to that or to him. At least star the project on GitHub I guess.

As for text, it depends very heavily on what exactly you need. Simple ASCII text and bitmap fonts? Just do it yourself or get a .bdf parser. Simple Latin/Cyrillic-like writing with ok-looking vector fonts (ttfs)? stb_truetype has all you need. Font hinting, subpixel rendering? You use freetype. More complex writing like Arabic? You will have to do shaping as well, say with HarfBuzz. Need right-to-left or unidirectional text? Hypenation? Go for platform APIs if you can (DirectWrite om Windows, CoreText on Mac).

Gold standard? Even though serious bugs are not fixed [1] because "the code is too fragile to touch at this point"? Looks like Android uses HarfBuzz, if so it can't be that bad.

[1] https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/issues/2814

The linked libraries are not even close to solving limited subsets of problems solved by FreeType or HarfBuzz. No test is needed if they do not even have a working implementation of particular requisites: Do they work on heterogeneous layouts, directions, languages, locales, scripts, symbols and composites, extensions, variations, legacy, missing, partial or corrupted instructions, standards interpretations, platforms, output devices, nonstandard point structures and grids?

They do not. What they solve is almost a toy problem compared to the size, scope and breadth of these libraries.

Just because some project is implemented in Rust does not make it comparable never mind superior by default.

There is a world out there and it is not homogeneous format and standards-compliant Latin fonts in English LTR text in linear disposition with some generic rectangular subpixel rendering on a regular rectangular grid.

I warmly welcome you to browse closed issues of FreeType [1] and also the closed issues of HarfBuzz [2]. If you feel inspired please do also look into mailing lists and discussion pages related to the development, building, tracking and patching of packages of these projects in any of the numerous places it is used.

The only argument Rust people have is in relation WASM but if you insist in targeting WASM why not fork FreeType, strip it to the strict subset of features your application needs and target it?

Why do it in the first place? Why reinvent the wheel?

As such I will restate my view: I see no gain in using any of these subpar libraries.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freetype/freetype/-/issues/?s...

[2] https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/issues?q=is%3Aclosed