Phoronix: freestar Google Chrome Replacing FreeType With Rust-Written Skrifa For Font Handling

Jonathan Fine <[email protected]> Thu, 20 Mar 2025 13:37:14 +0000
Newsgroups gmane.comp.tex.texhax
Message-ID <CALD=Yf_yOvxWN695b+NsYbSPLXGnw20A3hhsTwf9mZ-qjgwTfQ@mail.gmail.com>
Hi

I read this font news on Phoronix
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Google-Chrome-Going-Skrifa

The reason is to provide better memory safety in the web browser. Note that
"Skrifa is written in Rust and aims to tackle the subset of FreeType
functionality used by Google's Skia graphics library."

This restricts functionality to achieve memory safety (and perhaps more
developer productivity). I think that sometimes this is a good decision.
Don Knuth used only a subset of Pascal when he wrote TeX and METAFONT (but
for different reasons).

with kind regards

Jonathan