Rewriting LaTeX in Pure Rust

Re:Rewriting LaTeX in Pure Rust by coldtea on Monday December 07, 2020 @01:50AM (#25329931)

>Does anyone know if the Rust community has ever done anything original, though?

Yes, they made an original, better, programming language.

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Re:Rewriting LaTeX in Pure Rust by anand-bala on Monday December 07, 2020 @03:23AM (#25330305)

> Does anyone know if the Rust community has ever done anything original, though?

Depends on what you call "original". Is the Servo layout engine _not_ original because layout engines already exist? :)

Moving away from the rhetorical question, I think there are several reasons to rewrite something in Rust, the first and foremost being the huge improvement in memory safety/management. The other reasons are typically related to speed: C wasn't built with concurrency in mind, and trying to develop multi-threaded C applications that run in a cross-platform manner is not straightforward. On the other hand, Rust has the following:

1) Memory safety during concurrency [1]. 2) Multi-threading in the standard library [1]. 3) An amazing package ecosystem revolving around "crates". And there are several build specifically to make concurrency safe and easy to implement. [2]

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/ch16-00-concurrency.ht... [2] https://crates.io/categories/concurrency

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Re:Rewriting LaTeX in Pure Rust by jbergens on Monday December 07, 2020 @05:03AM (#25330768)

Rust seems to be a lot safer than C or C++ but I don't really understand why a documentation system must be written in a low level language.

Why not use C#, Java, Go or something similar? Most users can't really need extreme performance.

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Re:Rewriting LaTeX in Pure Rust by jabl on Monday December 07, 2020 @05:08AM (#25330796)

I'm quite sure anybody who has written substantial documents with *TeX disagrees that "extreme performance" isn't needed.

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Re:Rewriting LaTeX in Pure Rust by int_19h on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @01:47PM (#25349659)

The average document size hasn't increased in the last 30 years, though, did it? But hardware is several orders of magnitude faster.

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Re:Rewriting LaTeX in Pure Rust by jabl on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @02:51AM (#25356337)

I guess we're doing more with graphics, which tend to require more fiddling back and forth to make it look alright, as well as having much higher expectations about interactivity than in the past.

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Re:Rewriting LaTeX in Pure Rust by int_19h on Friday December 11, 2020 @02:12AM (#25383222)

In TeX? My impression was that it's still mostly used for papers, and the output is still normally static DVI/PS/PDF.

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Re:Rewriting LaTeX in Pure Rust by jeltz on Monday December 07, 2020 @06:42AM (#25331249)

LaTeX is a typesetting ststem, not a documentation system. Doing typesetting of large documents is performance critical.

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Re:Rewriting LaTeX in Pure Rust by moldavi on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @04:37AM (#25356865)

If typesetting is performance critical, what would count as a non-performance critical program?

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