[HarfBuzz] Language Modularization?

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Theppitak Karoonboonyanan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Some of my KDE friends are working on Thai support in Harfbuzz.
> However, you may know that it's quite expensive to get proper
> Thai word break support. It requires loading libthai and a whole
> dictionary data into memory.

Hi,

HarfBuzz is only a shaper.  It does not deal with line breaking.

behdad

> With Pango modularization, this is mitigated for non-Thai users by
> means of dynamic plug-ins. It's never loaded as long as no Thai
> text is processed.
> 
> But for current Harfbuzz, this mitigation is achieved by dlopen-ing
> libthai.so.0, which may or may not be available in the system.
> It's kind of loose dependency which can easily be missed by
> automatic packaging systems like shlibs tracking.
> 
> So, I wonder which direction Harfbuzz would go. Is dynamic
> module in the plan?
> 
> Thanks,