It is so snappy and with great error messages. I encourage people to try it out. The typst tutorial is very approachable.
"corpus-scale conversion work aimed at 90% error-free HTML (currently 75%)"
although there may be issues that I do not understand or did not see (I looked at the paper very quickly) that make it more difficult for the authors than for the simplest possible translation.
Having tried both TeXmacs and Typst¹, it’s easy for me to understand why Typst is rapidly gaining adoption and why, after — how long, over a decade? — essentially nobody uses TeXmacs.
Typora & Obsidian apply the same ideas to Markdown.
I do think WYSIWYG is an absolutely broken paradigm for anything outside of literally just desktop publishing --- but WYSIWYM has a lot of merit.
Enough that I've been working on a stand-alone Markdown editor component that takes ideas from Typora et al.
J. van der Hoeven. GNU TeXmacs: a free, structured, wysiwyg and technical text editor. In Daniel Filipo, editor, Le document au XXI-ième siècle, volume 39–40, pages 39–50. Metz, 14–17 mai 2001. Actes du congrès GUTenberg.
Reproduced at https://www.texmacs.org/Data/TeXmacs.pdf
For why so few people use TeXmacs, it may be that it is because few people believe that it is worth trying, as one would not expect that it works so well :-)
It's because they gave it a terrible name that strongly implies it's some kind of Emacs TeX editor.
Ooo I thought of another example of good WYSIWYG - Qt Creator's form editor. The only good GUI form editor I've used. Again the editing experience doesn't exactly match the output (e.g. some layout features are visible), but it's clearly WYSIWYG. It just doesn't suck like MS Word.
I also found the very useful comparison website https://polytype.dev/ on the subject!
Tectonic is a cool project, but hasn't seen any significant changes in a few years---and likely won't anytime soon. It seems we maintainers don't have the time and motivation to put serious work into Tectonic.
I haven't looked at the code in years (and thus may be wrong), but here's a quick overview:
Tectonic's code consists of thin bindings to /harfbuzz/graphite/etc and a vendored XeTeX (in C, with some tweaks to make the build easier), driven by Rust that tries to keep the TeX environment predictable and sane. A few components have been fully ported to Rust (bibtex, spx2html), but the project is very unfinished.
I've looked into the dark corners of TeX when I worked on Tectonic, and it is not pretty. TeX relies on a stack of evil hacks and esoteric behavior that is very hard to replicate, and very difficult to expose in an ergonomic way. This is true of the core system, and of many packages on CTAN.
A quick example: code highlighting does not work in Tectonic. The canonical solution is https://ctan.org/pkg/minted, which spawns a python process to style your code. Reproducibility is one of Tectonic's selling points, so we cannot replicate this behavior.
With https://typst.app/ as good as it is, there's little motivation to modernize TeX---especially considering the effort required. Typst _is_ modern TeX, and I'd rather spend my time there.