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Written by Thomas Phinney, Font Detective on 2025-02-01 at 23:43

The Chrome browser on Android, Linux and ChromeOS now does all its web font processing using a Rust-based library (Skrifa) instead of its old C++ library (FreeType).

This is part of a general trend. If you look at open jobs by programming language required, Rust is now #7 (up from #10 last time I looked). C++ and C# are declining drastically, Python, SQL, Java, and JavaScript/TypeScript are the top 5 and all growing rapidly. (Golang is #6, and also growing similarly to Rust.)

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Descendants

Written by Max Iorsh on 2025-02-02 at 07:37

@tphinney

Just about the time to introduce the first bits of C++ code into FontForge

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Written by Thibault on 2025-02-03 at 07:48

@tphinney Don't know anything about how fonts were rendered before in Chrom{e|ium} : but isn't FreeType related to the HarfBuzz project ?

Also, what issues in FreeType were solved by Skrifa? Genuinely curious about it.

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Written by Thomas Phinney, Font Detective on 2025-02-04 at 01:03

@thibault

FreeType renders glyphs from fonts. HarfBuzz determines what glyphs you want to render & how to position them. The latter can be very complicated and language-dependent.

I am sure you know this (and likely better than I do), but for other readers… Rust is much more secure than C++ by default, so a lot of core system libraries are moving to Rust. There are also other advantages for maintenance and stability (though gosh, is compile time ever slower for Rust!).

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Written by Thomas Phinney, Font Detective on 2025-02-04 at 01:11

@thibault ... these advantages are why Microsoft is migrating to Rust as well. I expect core libraries are their top priority, but just in general.

https://www.techzine.eu/news/devops/116080/microsoft-continues-push-to-switch-code-over-to-rust/

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Written by Sebastiano Giordano on 2025-02-03 at 08:53

@tphinney Hi, what's the source of the ranking for job openings? I'd like to read it.

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Written by Thomas Phinney, Font Detective on 2025-02-04 at 00:45

@krahos It is a graph in here:

https://zerotomastery.io/blog/best-programming-languages-to-learn/

(One can find a lot of different analyses, with at least moderately different results. I did not specifically look for one that rated Rust highly, this was just the one that I happened on. Nor is Rust super highly ranked here, for that matter.)

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