It's two years since this was posted, and the amazing news is that we now have not just one but two projects implementing text layout in Rust that look like they might be viable:
- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text/ - which is still has a way to go but already complex scenarios involving asian and arabic scripts, which is impressive considering it's only a couple of months old. This one is backed by System76 for use in their new desktop environment
- And https://github.com/dfrg/parley which looks abandoned but is already impressively complete and the author has signalled they intend to revisit at the start of this year. This one is being used in the Druid toolkit mentioned in the article (and it's successor Xilem) and also the text editor https://github.com/lapce/lapce which is based on that toolkit.
A clarification: Druid proper uses the text layout capabilities of the platform (DirectWrite on Windows, Core Text on macOS, and Pango on Linux), while Xilem does indeed use Parley. Lapce uses a fork of Druid that, as parent states, uses Parley for text layout.
It does look like a very good year coming up! I'm writing a reflection/wishes post as we speak.
Ah yes. I only really started following the Druid project closely recently, and I've focussed more on the newer sub-projects so my knowledge of Druid proper is limited (indeed partly because I am much more interested in "rust native" UI (to the extent that that is possible) than I am in toolkits that rely heavily on closed-source OS provided APIs.
It is kind of tragic when so much work gets wrapped into libraries coded in obscure languages, and so never gets out to affect much in the world.
Doubtless, enormous brilliance went into Symbolics OS and UI code, all washed away when Symbolics tanked. On the up side, untold gigabytes of bad Java code were flushed in the big tech meltdown of 2000. When Twitter and Facebook go flat like inflatable lawn decorations in a cold snap, will much of anything be lost? (Anyway zstd and lz4 will survive.) How much stuff is coded in Wolfram?
Obscure code today goes onto GitHub repositories rather that just evaporating, but it is more manual labor to find and transcribe to a live language than can usually be mustered.
- https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text/ - which is still has a way to go but already complex scenarios involving asian and arabic scripts, which is impressive considering it's only a couple of months old. This one is backed by System76 for use in their new desktop environment
- And https://github.com/dfrg/parley which looks abandoned but is already impressively complete and the author has signalled they intend to revisit at the start of this year. This one is being used in the Druid toolkit mentioned in the article (and it's successor Xilem) and also the text editor https://github.com/lapce/lapce which is based on that toolkit.