tempfile VS tectonic

I need to do some tests with files operations, what's the best practice in regards to creating temporary files in tests ? I heard about tempfile but is there a more idiomatic way to do that ?

The sudo-rs Cargo.toml [1] file seems very reasonable. This is the curse of being cross platform. The inclusion of https://github.com/Stebalien/tempfile as a dependency is responsible for the overwhelming majority of lines due to including *-sys crates for multiple OSs.

~/Code/tempfile !! tokei vendor

Eventually, I had to test reading of input file and generation of the html file. To do this, I would need to create test files for input and output for this scenario. However, this could cause problems unless I named all the test files differently as tests usually run in parallel. So, I decided to use the tempfile crate to create a temporary test directory for each test (where needed):

Create a NamedTempFile with the tempfile crate.

Even better would be to create a tempdir and populate it during the test run. Try the tempfile crate.

Not the same commenter but you could use a tempfile

That said though; there are a few solutions for the problem you're describing. One would be to have a "temp file" type which knows how to delete itself when dropped, but can manually be converted into a permanent file in the case of success. Crates like tempfile provide abstractions for this.

tempdir was merged into tempfile.

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.