Swift at Apple: Migrating the TrueType hinting interpreter

pjmlp

During the State of Platform keynote, on the subject of Swift adoption across macOS, several examples were given, not only TrueType engine. RIS is happening across all OS levels, if the keynote is to be believed.

troupo

I think these are the types of things Apple should've focused on instead of half-heartedly barging ahead with SwiftUI and breaking the language in the process

saagarjha

Interesting that this is published under the MIT, rather than Apple’s more favorite Apache 2, license

mrpippy

The author discussed this a bit on Mastodon as well: https://xoxo.zone/@numist/116716469017975106

weinzierl

Back in 2023 there was talks about Microsoft rewriting the font stuff in Rust for similar reasons Apple is now doing the Swift move. I'm not sure what became of it and if it ever shipped. If anyone knows I'd be curious.

LoganDark

I'm surprised the code has visible LLM smells. Though, I shouldn't be surprised. I hope the important bits are still human-controlled (and the same for Apple's many operating systems that absolutely deserve to remain stable and understood).

airstrike

As much as I enjoyed Swift, one can only wonder what the world would look like if they had gone with Rust as their default language instead.

raphlinus

Welcome to the club of doing high performance text in a memory safe language!

wg0

No mention of AI? Hand written code?

AndriyKunitsyn

What's funny is from 2023 (I think), macOS just draws the UI unhinted. You have a 1080p display and you don't want to see the letters in the UI blurred to death? Tough luck, 1080p is incompatible with macOS, everybody needs "retina", and nobody cares that Windows and all Linux DEs look on 1080p just fine. It looks like this hinter will be used only in rendering PDFs, because that's where they test the performance.

jacquesgt

If you want to help improve the security of OS software through the magic of memory safe languages, the team that did this work is hiring: https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=Spear&sort=releva... Knowledge of Swift not required. If you know your way around OS software, can reason about the security of the code you write, and are excited about writing exhaustively tested software, we’d love to talk to you. We’re hiring for roles in kernel/systems and userspace. Like the Platforms SOTU mentioned, we’re using Swift at all layers of the software stack now. https://www.youtube.com/live/yl2jsIoMfDU I had the pleasure of leading the effort to ship Swift in the Secure Enclave back in 2022. Now I have multiple teams working on accelerating the transition to memory safe languages. We’re showing that with good planning and a relentless focus on testing, we can improve security, performance, and functionality. And we get to have a ton of fun working with some amazing colleagues. It’s the most enjoyable and impactful work I’ve ever done in my career.

comex

Beware: As of a few months ago, when I tried to use the lifetime features shown off in this post, I ran into constant compiler crashes with very simple programs, until I gave up and wrote off the features as unusable. This happened on both stable and nightly compilers. I guess they work well enough for this TrueType interpreter, but I suspect they’re using a narrow subset of what the features are supposed to support. Or maybe things have been fixed very recently. That said, I’m looking forward to using Swift lifetimes once they actually work!

ks2048

So, hinting only takes place at low resolutions, I believe. How often is it used, eg viewing “typical” PDFs on “typical” screens?