Tectonic: a modernized, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine

Re:Tectonic: a modernized, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine by dom0 on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @06:06AM (#14451382)

I'm not sure that's feasible.. there are exactly zero independent TeX or TeX-like implementations, everything is patches on top of TeX, which probably has a reason (given the general open source community's inclination to rewrite things). I am by no means an expert on TeX internals, but just cursory browsing of the code makes it look like a rather massive and complex piece of software.

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Re:Tectonic: a modernized, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine by pkgwilliams on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @08:12AM (#14451829)

The C/C++ code add up to about 120,000 lines.

Yes, it is massive and complex.

Fortunately, the core engine is essentially self-contained. Almost all of the things that make the TeX frustrating come from the UX, or the difficulty of adding new capabilities that call for somewhat more modern C code. By compiling all of the C with a Rust wrapper, we get a single binary out in the end, plus the ability to extend the engine in ways that were just not feasible before.

Revamping the core engine code from C to Rust would be nice, because it could be cleaner and more comprehensible, but it actually doesn't buy you anything in terms of the UX.

Edit: also, I didn't realize this when I made the decision to fork XeTeX, but LuaTeX has shifted to a C implementation that is more or less detached from the original WEB code.

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