Do you really believe the only way to implement ligatures is with a virtual machine? Dumb and dirty psuedocode written in 5 seconds of thinking about it but come on, this is not that complicated.

  for each character in text
    characterToPrint = Parse(character)
    if character is LigatureStartCandidate
      characterToPrint = LookAheadForNextLigatureCandidateAndResolve(character)
    Print(characterToPrint)

▲ roughly 4 hours ago | parent [-]

And you've now gotten 92% of the way there. Iterate a few dozen more times to get up to 97%, 98%, 99%, etc., and eventually you'll have rewritten OpenType.

	▲	anonymous908213 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Would you like to elaborate on those few dozen more cases rather than handwaving them away? Embedding a VM into a font format is foundationally a ridiculous idea and should require real justification, although I know our industry is in love with anything that allows arbitrary code execution exploits.