On Thursday, 31 October 2024 at 13:08:55 UTC, IchorDev wrote:
On Friday, 25 October 2024 at 12:49:36 UTC, cookiewitch wrote:
[...]
I'd really appreciate it if there were some other, more
comprehensive learning resources. Do you know any?
Sorry for my late reply! Anyway, here we go…
[...]
Some consideration should be given to where to start. For
instance, one could build up from HarfBuzz. However, HarfBuzz
is another GLib-based FSF C library, just like Pango, so
perhaps this would just shift the compromises further down the
line. Say we want *no* compromises; then we have to do
everything 100% in D. Certainly neither of these options are
trivial, and it would be a fool's errand to embark upon them
alone.
Thank you for dedicating your time to this, and for the very
elaborate response! Reimplementing PangoLayout does sound like an
option, but as far as I've seen, Pango operates on strings all
the way through. I suppose it is possible to assemble parts of
the rope into a string on the stack, and only operate on a single
part at once, but I don't think this is going to be very
bug-proof. Alternatively, Fluid's text engine does distinguish
between static and dynamic text with an "edit mode" flag, so it
could be possible to apply Pango on stringified static text, but
that's never going to be enough.
Oh, and also, since Pango is LGPLv2 licensed, I think a port of
`PangoLayout` could run into licensing problems the way D
programs are usually built \[with DUB\].
Having a full D text layout engine is a pet dream of mine of
course, so if you're interested in contributing to a project
like that then I might be able to dedicate some of my spare
time to it.
I've been thinking about this last week and I'm under the
impression this is what is going to happen anyway. For what it's
worth, I'm currently working on another large PR which upscales
Fluid's text engine, splitting it into a separate `fluid.text`
package and optimizing it on the way through. It is mostly
standalone, so if you find it appropriate, I could create a new
Git & DUB repository for it once I'm done. I would like to have
your input on it.
