KPathSea bindings for Java

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Sat Jul 20 23:38:06 CEST 2024


Suppose someone (else) wanted to create a JNI interface for, say, TeX
typesetting functionality. In theory I agree it would be ideal, from a
software engineering point of view, if this ended up as a single project
that included both the jkpathsea and the new typesetting stuff, but in
practice, how likely is that? In my experience ... hardly at all. People
always want to set up new projects in ways that they understand, they
control, etc. The amount of duplicated code in the world (TeX and
otherwise) because of this is ... staggering.

Thus I don't think it would be bad for everything about this to be named
"jkpathsea"? "tex4j" sounds to me exactly like some sort of Java
implementation/library for all of TeX, and it isn't. Wdyt? --best, karl.


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