alt Hacker News> Benchmarks show that per-paragraph recompilation achieves O(1) latency, constant regardless of document size, whereas Typst’s [3] incremental compilation scales linearly (O(n)).
> The tradeoff is temporary inconsistency: pages the user is not viewing may lag until a background compile converges, [...]
There doesn't seem to be any reason functionality like this couldn't also be added to Typst though. In general the authors of this paper seem dismissive of typst, but Typst also fixes so many other things about LaTeX, like the awful syntax. Not sure why they act like that.
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The answer is fairly obvious, Typst (like ConTeXt) is not LaTeX. Typst is a perfectly fine solution if you're giving the typeset output (i.e. a PDF) to someone, it not a solution if you need to give the document source to someone (if the person expects LaTeX, or .doc(x), or some other format). Many of the issues people raise with LaTeX are due to needing to pass on the document source to someone (otherwise you could use whatever packages or engines you wanted), but that is fundamental to interoperability and why LaTeX (and Markdown) stick around.
> There doesn't seem to be any reason functionality like this couldn't also be added to Typst though.
If I have to guess it's because the temporal inconsistency tradeoff can actually affect the current page too, since it might depend on the previous pages for layout, references, etc etc.
Typst on the other hand aims to have no inconsistencies due to incremental compilation.
> Not sure why they act like that.
They seem to launch paid competitor.
> There doesn't seem to be any reason functionality like this couldn't also be added to Typst though.
Correct, and the paper author even suggested that they could add that in their presentation earlier today [0].
> In general the authors of this paper seem dismissive of typst, but Typst also fixes so many other things about LaTeX, like the awful syntax. Not sure why they act like that.
Well this was a presentation at a (La)TeX conference [1], and this is a preprint for a (La)TeX journal [2], so this specific audience is more interested in hearing about extensions to LaTeX than about Typst. (This certainly isn't a requirement though—we've happily accepted articles and presentations about non-TeX software, since we always like to hear about what's going on elsewhere)
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/live/6riWbnT0grs?si=2ls7VrAIE9WCU5kK... (starts at 3:12:09)
[1]: https://tug.org/tug2026/
[2]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/