On Thu, Jan 09, 2014 at 03:24:59PM +0100, Markus Teich wrote:
> Heyho,
>
> are there plans to port surf to gtk3, so it can be used under
> wayland?
>
> --Markus
>
It's a bit on the side of the topic but GTK+ is now hard
dependent through pango on harfbuzz, a c++ component (object
oriented cluster f....), which pulls a dependency on c++
compiler/runtime.
To safeguard netsurf from the toxic c++, a good thing would be to
be able to compile the entire user level stack of netsurf with a
C compiler like tinycc.
Another way to see thing would be to go to EFL. After discussing
that with the EFL developer in charge, the EFL text layout engine
can be set to use harfbuzz or a internal basic one. But the
developer strongly suggested that it may become hard dependant on
harfbuzz in the end. Then better stick with GTK+, since at least
it's protected with a GNU (L)GPL license, then GTK+3 support
would make sense.
Since a unicode text layout engine is very important for a
international browser, and since the C toolkits are delegating
that task to a c++ component... what to do? Because, netsurf
being the only C coded javascript www browser out there, in my
humble opinion, it's important to safeguard this feature.
Personnally, I did a very partial C port of harfbuzz in C,
https://code.google.com/p/charfbuzz/ , which is a drop in
remplacement of harfbuzz (C api). I already mentioned it several
times on this mailing list. I'm not working on it right now (I'm
on an alternative linux radeon driver), but I will probably come
back to unroll the original c++ code in C in the futur.
regards,
--
Sylvain
Received on Thu Jan 09 2014 - 16:02:00 CET