Re: Appreciation / Financial support

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

Am 2012-05-30 um 21:35 schrieb Bernardo Barros:

> On 05/30/2012 09:14 AM, Bernardo Barros wrote:
> > Not
> > sure about the user base, but it is growing fast.
>
> it seems some very motivated guy started a implementation of TeX in
> Haskell. It says it already does math formulas and footnotes. Maybe he
> is just crazy.
>
>  https://github.com/luispedro/hex
>
> He says he is trying to achieve ``better scripting, faster, use of
> multi-core[...]''

Great, if it actually works. (AFAIK there’s also a implementation of  
certain parts of TeX in JavaScript...)

On TeX mailing lists we frequently hear ideas of parallelizing (multi- 
threading) of TeX tasks. The wizards tell us, most of the processing  
would be unsuitable for parallelizing, because every bit of layout is  
depending on the previous. (Thus, luispedro’s #3, #4, #10 would be  
impossible to do.)

Some lunatics ;-) spent a lot of effort re-implementing TeX in Java,  
that was called "NTS" (new typsetting system); they stopped after  
implementing TeX compatibility (alias "OTS" = old ts. system). I heard  
it was sluggish and ugly, but the team found the last bugs in TeX and  
immediately started the development of LuaTeX, that’s still in  
development but already a big success. (It also includes MetaPost as a  
library, thus inlining MP graphics processing.)


Greetlings, Hraban