alt Hacker NewsSwift at Apple: Migrating the TrueType hinting interpreter
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Interesting that this is published under the MIT, rather than Apple’s more favorite Apache 2, license
Back in 2023 there was talks about Microsoft rewriting the font stuff in Rust for similar reasons Apple is now doing the Swift move.
I'm not sure what became of it and if it ever shipped. If anyone knows I'd be curious.
As much as I enjoyed Swift, one can only wonder what the world would look like if they had gone with Rust as their default language instead.
What's funny is from 2023 (I think), macOS just draws the UI unhinted. You have a 1080p display and you don't want to see the letters in the UI blurred to death? Tough luck, 1080p is incompatible with macOS, everybody needs "retina", and nobody cares that Windows and all Linux DEs look on 1080p just fine.
It looks like this hinter will be used only in rendering PDFs, because that's where they test the performance.
Welcome to the club of doing high performance text in a memory safe language!
I'm surprised the code has visible LLM smells. Though, I shouldn't be surprised. I hope the important bits are still human-controlled (and the same for Apple's many operating systems that absolutely deserve to remain stable and understood).
I think these are the types of things Apple should've focused on instead of half-heartedly barging ahead with SwiftUI and breaking the language in the process
During the State of Platform keynote, on the subject of Swift adoption across macOS, several examples were given, not only TrueType engine.
RIS is happening across all OS levels, if the keynote is to be believed.