wgpu_glyph VS fontdue

It won't live in WebGPU itself, but I do expect to start to see more third-party libraries for text. There’s already wgpu_glyph (https://github.com/hecrj/wgpu_glyph/tree/master) which uses a glyph atlas (CPU-rendered sprite map of characters), but techniques for signed-distance field fonts have come a long way too.

I've been searching for one all day, and wgpu_glyph is the only obvious choice, but it's incompatible with Android (and in fact crashes on startup even if all you do is add it as a dependency)

The other alternative is to go a level lower and use something like fontdue and then roll my own font rendering pipe, but that seems overkill for what seems like a simple problem.

I agree that no_std is incredible. I really want to see more crates embrace it and encapsulate their no_std logic away from their standard logic. I very often see crates that are like 95% of the way to no_std but then choose to bundle some standard only features without flagging them.

I wrote fontdue [0] (which is very incomplete spec wise) because there just wasn't another font library that was no_std at that time. It felt like the existing libraries were in an arms race for gpu caches and bundling file loading. Like if I wanted to commit to a running on a platform I'd do the sane thing and use harfbuzz or the platform APIs.

[0] https://github.com/mooman219/fontdue

Like tiny-skia? As for font-specific one there are ab-glyph and fontdue.

I work on a SIMD optimized font library [0] and have stumbled into the same situation of hand writing SIMD intrinsics. Some things are just kinda hard to make sure they get optimized correctly, and there is enough difference between the platforms where that matters when fiddling with bits. I also kinda have fun writing SIMD code like this too.

[0]: https://github.com/mooman219/fontdue/blob/master/src/platfor...

The other library that does a similar thing to ab_glyph/rusttype I remember hearing about is fontdue (https://github.com/mooman219/fontdue)