rustybuzz VS pathfinder

Bit of a side note, but COSMIC depends on the rustybuzz text shaper which is deprecated: https://github.com/RazrFalcon/rustybuzz/issues/74. There was some work underway to bring it up to sync with the latest harfbuzz and then handing over ownership to the harfbuzz team, but this seems to have fizzled out.

I understand that this may sound harsh, but I also ported two (far bigger) codebases from C++ to Rust: rustybuzz and tiny-skia. Both of which are production -ready and not just prototypes. And mine not only do not use pointers, but also barely use unsafe in general.

You could also take a look at the history of this repository: https://github.com/RazrFalcon/rustybuzz

harfbuzz is a popular library for text rendering. You may also want to check out rustybuzz, a small subset of harfbuzz ported to Rust with pretty great documentation.

Use allsorts or rustbuzz for text shaping

Yeah Allsorts looks interesting, and rustybuzz is another option. I haven’t tried either yet, though.

https://github.com/coconut-xr/apfel-kruemel works today, I only know about battery-optimized software in the context of games though.

https://felt.com/blog/svg-to-canvas-part-2-building-interact... and https://github.com/servo/pathfinder/ might also be of interest.

Parts of Servo to enable the use of the GPU for compositing layers were merged into Firefox years ago.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f...

It's a shame that Patrick Walton didn't get a chance to finish his work on the Pathfinder GPU renderer.

>Pathfinder 3 is a fast, practical, GPU-based rasterizer for fonts and vector graphics using OpenGL 3.0+, OpenGL ES 3.0+, WebGL 2, and Metal.

https://github.com/servo/pathfinder

You might be interested in https://github.com/servo/pathfinder

It uses too much CPU and performance leaves much to be desired compared to Chromium. They were going to use Pathfinder in Firefox to solve this problem, but since Pathfinder is discontinued due to the massive layoffs at Mozilla, the project was abandoned. And they need a replacement IMO.

I am not an expert in the area, just somebody who read up on it after realizing desktop in VR does not work out for me (and usually low res is not a problem).

I think something like https://github.com/servo/pathfinder (newer) and as you mentioned SDF (older) are the latest approaches.

This is exciting! And, by the way, are you planning to implement something similar to Servo's Pathfinder in Firefox?

Also on my list was pathfinder. There the documented crate is vastly different from https://github.com/servo/pathfinder which looks much more promising – it comes with a few examples, some of wihch might help me get started, maybe?

Have you checked out the Pathfinder library?

https://github.com/servo/pathfinder

Don't forget gpu-based text rendering (e.g. #1, #2, #3). It's still in its infant stages, and seems to be mostly untouched over the past 5 years, but I suspect it will become the preferred method for rendering text later.