| ▲ | Copyrightest 15 hours ago | |
I imagine making a buggy and unmaintainable version could be done quickly, sure, if you don't mind your documents being killed by a thousand small typesetting cuts. TeX is incredibly complicated for good reasons, people should read Knuth's book. The reason TeX is written in a 1984 dialect of Pascal is that the typesetting bugs have been solved in a completely specified language; it is much easier to write a transpiler for Pascal->C than to rewrite TeX. Asking an LLM to rewrite it in the language-du-jour is a huge cost for very little benefit. BTW it has been so depressing in the last few months to see LLM-generated projects make claims about performance/accuracy, but there is no benchmarking code on Github and the "thousands of tests" are all useless happy paths. I am sure we will see some grifter claim that Claude rewrote TeX and I am sure dozens of credulous HN users will take it seriously. But we won't see a useful rewrite. It'll be resume-oriented slop like that dishonest Mathematica-in-Rust project we saw last week. | ||
| ▲ | thangalin 7 hours ago | parent [-] | |
> it is much easier to write a transpiler for Pascal->C than to rewrite TeX. Asking an LLM to rewrite it in the language-du-jour ... I thought that the combination of the Pascal and Java versions[1] of TeX would be sufficient guidance to produce another language/implementation. > is a huge cost for very little benefit A greenfield Java implementation with an MIT license would have been useful[2] for rendering TeX inside of my desktop Markdown editor[3]. Instead, I had to rename all the Java source files to abide by the NTSPL license terms (or GPLv2, which is viral). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Typesetting_System [2]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/-/blob/main/LICENSE.t... | ||