Re: Lout typesetting questions

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On Sun Nov 9, 2025 at 3:10 PM CET, Basile Starynkevitch wrote:
> I just did git clone https://git.sr.ht/~mcepl/lout/ (on Linux/Debian/test=
ing, not interested by other OSes) and I have a few questions about it.
>
> 1. Is GNU lout still some active open source project?

Define =E2=80=9Cactive=E2=80=9D. In most definitions of the term it is dead=
 as
nail (the real development ceased somewhere around the version
0.36, which was released on 2010-09-14), for many years the only
changes are cleanups and fixes for crashes. On the other hand
there seems to be a community of users, and CVEs have been fixed
in some realtively non-crazy amount of time.

> 2. Does anyone have a public document (or HTML5 public page,
> or some public email on some public and still accessible in 2025
> archived mailing list)=C2=A0
> describing the organization of the C files (the file names
> z[0-9]*.c are not very user or developer friendly).

I guess, you are supposed to know your way around ctags and
cscope pretty well.

> 3. Is Lout multi-threaded? (I believe it is not)

I don=E2=80=99t think so.

> 3. Did anyone tried to use the Boehm garbage collector in Lout?

I don=E2=80=99t think so.

> 4. Did anyone tried to extend Lout with some plugin machinery
> (like recent GCC have)? Is there any philosophical objection if I
> try to add one?

I don=E2=80=99t think so, and I would expect you would have to keep it as
your own fork, because I don=E2=80=99t think Jeff accepts any significant
changes.

> 5. Did anyone experimented some Lout extensions adding a
> [turing-complete] scripting language inside it (Like LuaLaTeX
> has)? I dream of a Lout extended with GNU guile (perhaps might
> work on it once I understood Lout internal organization)

See the previous reply, I think you would have to keep it as your
private fork.

Also, my personal observations =E2=80=A6 there are some people who love
Lisp-like langauges (including you, apparently), but it is not
very common affliction and for example GNUCash people had the
hardest time to get rid of that scripting language and switch to
something more normal. I think Lua (hey, you can use Fennel for
writing the code!) or Python would be much more appreciated by
others.

Best,

Mat=C4=9Bj

--=20
http://matej.ceplovi.cz/blog/, @[email protected]
GPG Finger: 3C76 A027 CA45 AD70 98B5  BC1D 7920 5802 880B C9D8
=20
Only two of my personalities are schizophrenic, but one of them
is paranoid and the other one is out to get him.


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