tectonic VS prusti-dev

You may want to try https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic, which downloads files from TeXLive on-demand.

v2 has improved TeX engine lookup, improved PDF template look&feel, proper support for MS Windows (where it comes integrated with the Tectonic engine) and a few more new features.

There's https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic but I think the issue with that idea is that sure, you can re-implement TeX (it's sufficiently simple) in Rust and then run LaTeX packages on top of it, but then you're back to LaTeX and all its weirdness so you haven't really gained anything compared to LaTeX itself.

In terms of TeX, I would recommend taking a look at tectonic, a self-contained TeX distribution that auto-installs packages you need when you need them, and “just works” when you call the binary to compile… Because screw messing around with package managers, CTAN and XeTeX. I’ve been using it for around a year and it’s so much easier than any other TeX distribution.

For example, you can have your main application in something like Deno/Node/python that acts as a server, and then delegate the actual pdf generation to tectonic (https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic) or Typst https://typst.app/blog/2023/beta-oss-launch/

tectonic: https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic

How does it compare with Tectonic?

It's sad that Tectonic conversion to Rust[1] was never finished. For now it's just a wrapper around C and C++ code. By far, it was the most promising thing in this distribution.

[1] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/459

The only thing I've seen is https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic but that's an actual re-implementation of TeX Rust.

> The overall goal would be to figure out classical error conditions like nill pointers deference.

> If I can figure out if a pointer will be nil in some execution branch, there is no reason why a computer cannot do the same.

Note, this is called flow-sensitive typing (also called type narrowing) and I think that typescript does it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-sensitive_typing

> I personally would see this as an human race level upgrades. Imagine feeding your code to a CI that spit back something like: "you will have a panic at line 156 when your input is > 4"

A model checker can do that!

See this

https://model-checking.github.io/kani/tutorial-kinds-of-fail...

Other techniques are also possible

https://github.com/viperproject/prusti-dev#quick-example

(Here I could link a lot of things, I just selected two Rust projects to illustrate)

This works better if you are able to provide contracts in your API that says which guarantees you provide. Alternatively, asserts are useful too.

You might be interested in the Prusti project, which statically checks for absence of reachable panics, overflows etc. It also allows user-defined specifications such as pre and post-conditions, loop body invariants, termination checking and so on.

https://github.com/viperproject/prusti-dev

This is called refinement types and prusti might be the project you saw.

But there's also a lot of exciting work around formal verification like Prusti.

prusti

Efforts: seL4, Project Everest, the Prossimo project of the ISRG, Let's Encrypt, and Prusti for the Rust language

Wow that sounds really cool! I'm not an expert but does that mean that one day you could implement dependend types or refinement types in Rust as a crate ? I currently only know of tools like: Flux Creusot Kani Prusti