harfbuzz VS QEMU

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

My most-wanted QEMU feature: https://github.com/qemu/qemu/commit/a2260983c6553

Using `gic-version=3` on macOS you can now use more than 8 cores on ARM chips.

A better solution is just to write a plain ass shell script that tests if various C snippets compile.

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/configure

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/blob/master/build/detect-pwe...

Not an unholy mix of m4, shell, and C, all in the same file.

---

These are the same style as a the configure scripts that Fabrice Bellard wrote for tcc and QEMU.

They are plain ass shell scripts, because he actually understands the code he writes.

https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/configure

https://github.com/TinyCC/tinycc/blob/mob/configure

OCaml’s configure script is also “normal”.

You don’t have to copy and paste thousands of lines of GNU stuff that you don’t understand.

(copy of lobste.rs comment)

Related:

A fast Pascal (Delphi) WebAssembly interpreter:

https://github.com/marat1961/wasm

WASM-4:

https://github.com/aduros/wasm4

Curated list of awesome things regarding WebAssembly (wasm) ecosystem:

https://github.com/mbasso/awesome-wasm

Also, it would be nice if there was a WASM (soft) CPU for QEMU, which (if it existed!) would go here:

https://github.com/qemu/qemu/tree/master/target

> architectural registers are always updated

In tiny code, the guest registers (global TCG variables) are stored in the host's registers until you either call an helper which can access the CPU state or you return (`git grep la_global_sync`). This is the reason why QEMU is not so terribly slow.

But after a check, this also happens when you access the guest memory address space! https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/include/tcg/tcg-opc... (TCG_OPF_SIDE_EFFECTS is what matters)

But still, in the end, it's the same problem. What QEMU does, can be done in LLVM too. You could probably be more efficient in LLVM by using the exception handling mechanism (invoke and friends) to only serialize back to memory when there's an actual exception, at the cost of higher register pressure. More or less what we do here: https://rev.ng/downloads/bar-2019-paper.pdf

Um, in case you don't know, UTM (based on QEMU) is out for quite a while.

Some of these tools include Oracle VM VirtualBox (that I've used since before the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle), VMWare Workstation Player, and QEMU, but last year, I found out about Multipass.

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.

For all the users of the Linux platform, QEMU is the VM that you should go for. This software comes without any price tag and works as an emulator of various machines with utmost ease and completion; the software uses dynamic translations to emulate hardware peripherals and enhances its overall performance. If you are using QEMU as a virtualizer, then it will function exactly like the host system (provided you have the right set of hardware).

In this tutorial, we set up macOS and Windows virtual machines on UTM, a macOS application that provides a GUI wrapper for QEMU, a powerful open-source emulator and virtualizer. UTM allows you to easily manage and run virtual machines without memorizing complex commands. It also has special handling for macOS, making it simpler to install compared to other virtual machine software.