Google is rewriting HarfBuzz and FreeType in Rust

The author of HarfBuzz has published State of Text Rendering 2024, where he describes the ongoing rewrite of the entire open-source text rendering stack in Rust which is funded by Google Fonts.

The motivations for it are laid out at https://github.com/googlefonts/oxidize, and the actual code is at https://github.com/googlefonts/fontations. The individual crates are already published to crates.io, too!

The intent does seem to be to completely replace the C/C++ code in HarfBuzz and FreeType in Android and Chrome, which would be a massive win for security. Numerous other HarfBuzz/FreeType users such as Firefox and all the Linux desktop would also benefit.

Curiously, Microsoft is rewriting their proprietary font parsing code in Rust as well: https://redd.it/12yg3cp