Only in Rust, please!

I’ve been reading on phoronix.com about “Papers”, Gnome’s recent Document Viewer.

It is a GTK4-Based Evince Fork, implemented in Rust.

uid313 commented

I am pleased to hear it is being written in Rust. I hope it also uses a Rust library for PDF because PDF is a huge specification, thousands of pages so it is important to have a safe and secure library so it is not vulnerable to security vulnerabilities.

Good that it is packaged with Flatpak too so that it is sandboxed.It’s Poppler; so, the same as before. (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Incubator/papers) Same with the djvu, & ps engines.

uid313 asked for a safe and secure implementation of a PDF engine and implies, or rather takes for granted that current Poppler library is not either safe or secure because it is not implemented in Rust. But why Rust and not D, or Eiffel, or Go or any other “safe” and performant programming language?

It seems to be a mild case of “not-invented-here” syndrome, shunning language interoperability.

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