Discussion
Before people go all in on Typst, I’d like them to consider the wisdom of replacing TeX, software that is:
- Absolutely finished
- Essentially bug free
- Written in a simple, highly portable language
- Extremely general
- Backwards compatible with decades old code
…with a commercial product that relies on an enormous tangled web of dependencies amounting to millions of lines of code for something which is far less general than that which it replaces
@glocq I don’t care if something is nominally open source. I care about my ability to port, maintain, and run it myself. TeX asks almost nothing of the OS and is written in a very simple dialect of Pascal. I’ve written my own compiler. Typst requires a multi million line of code compiler and very specific computing environment.
@kevin Ok I think I understand your point. I understand that being "nominally open source" isn't the be all end all of software, but IMO your initial criticism lacked specifics to the point of being misleading.
From what I understand, all your concerns are related to Typst being written in Rust. I don't think I'm alone in not immediately identifying the Rust compiler as a potentially problematic dependency (with how standard it's become). It would have helped being more specific.
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@kevin Did you perhaps miss that Typst (the web app) relies on the `typst` self-contained executable, whose source is released under the FOSS Apache license, and whose (command-line) interface is dead simple? Otherwise I have no idea what you're talking about... (this is a genuine question by the way)