iconvg VS wasm2ps

The HN thread also mentions Lottie from AirBnB and IconVG from Not-an-official-Google-product.

IconVG author here. Happy to discuss.

Animation is issue #2 on https://github.com/google/iconvg and I have some ideas but no code yet. I'm also midway through changing the current "version 0" format into a "version 1" format, dropping things like the ArcTo op (inspired by SVG) precisely with one eye on (future) animation support. The ArcTo large-arc-flag, like any boolean-typed value, is impossible to interpolate smoothly.

https://github.com/google/iconvg/blob/main/spec/iconvg-spec.... also doesn't explain what relative cubeTo does, though from the context (2D vector graphics), “relative” must mean the co-ordinates are relative to the position of the cursor (as opposed to “absolute” which is relative to some fixed origin), and “cube” probably refers to cubic interpolation.

It's come up in discussions I've been in before, mostly with the PostScript document language, since you can run programs on your printer with PS, albeit incredibly slowly. I've written a roundabout C-to-printer compiler of sorts which compiles WASM code to PS, and it is admittedly even slower because it doesn't do much on the stack. But stack languages and linear logic have a pretty neat correspondence.

I'm not a fan of the usual uses of S-expressions in data formats, but for quite the opposite reasons. People seem to have a thing for making up new syntax, so you can't just throw a normal S-expression parser at the problem, and be done with it. For example, the wasm2ps reader [1] has to know how to read a comment in the WebAssembly text format. I decided to leave the project at handling integer instructions and control flow only, as there are other oddities like using a single atom for alignment and offsets in load and store instructions [2]. Some people I've talked to wished that people would stop inventing ad-hoc syntaxes, and just use S-expressions or something. Using S-expressions but adding more ad-hoc syntax gives you the worst of both options.

While admittedly less of a problem for implementation, it is also annoying to see lists with dangling parens on their own lines, and symbols with underscores or camelCase in the names, once you are used to the normal way of formatting Lisp code.

[1] https://github.com/no-defun-allowed/wasm2ps/blob/master/Code...