[HarfBuzz] harfbuzz-ng progress report

[Simon Hausmann]

On Sunday 24 May 2009 Behdad Esfahbod, wrote:
> Hi Nicolas,
> 
> As promised, here's a more detailed report.  CC'ing HarfBuzz list actually.
> 
> In April, I talked to my managers and they agreed to put me back on working 
on 
> HarfBuzz for a while.  I started getting back to the code and continuing my 
> layout engine rewrite.
> 
> At LGM Jonathan and I sat down and checked the code together, we then 
reviewed 
> Pango's shaper APIs, current HarfBuzz shaping API, and expressed our 
designs, 
> needs, and concerns (for Pango, Mozilla, XeTeX, etc).  We believe we have a 
> great design in mind in term of APIs which I'll start putting together soon 
> and Jonathan will join me in filling in the bits.
> 
> In the mean time, I finished my layout engine rewrite.  A few minutes ago, I 
> removed the old code.  It's all in pango's git repo in the harfbuzz-ng 
branch. 
>   Gone is 16k lines of code which parsed the OpenType tables in memory. 
> Replacement is 6k lines that uses mmap()ed fonts.  Sanitization is still not 
> implemented, so there's a bit more to do.  But the code already does more 
than 
> the old one.  And IranNastaliq and other complex fonts I tested render 
correctly.
> 
> Plans forward is:
> 
>    - Next week: I'll finish the layout rewrite.  Adding sanity-checking code. 
>   May add stubs for BASE and JSTF tables too.
> 
>    - June: I'll start building the highlevel HarfBuzz API and prototyping 
the 
> implementation, with Latin and Arabic only initially.  Jonathan will 
hopefully 
> join me in bringing Indic shapers together and filling in the rest of the 
shapers.
> 
>    - July first half: I'll be at GUADEC, talking about this and minor 
hacking.
> 
>    - July second half and August: I'll be pulling things together to ship 
next 
> Pango stable version with an internal copy of the new HarfBuzz.  Hopefully 
> making the release stable and push out as a separate shared library early 
2010.
> 
>    - Profit!

Indeed, this is great news Behdad.

I'm going to be at the Gran Canaria Summit, too. Looking forward to meet there 
and talk about the code over a beer or two :)


Simon
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