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The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

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Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#21

Post by patrickg »

* First of all, the OP mixes up LaTeX and TeX. TeX is written in a very portable language and has been ported to more platforms than most other software, including PDP-10 and others.

* LaTeX is working on the iPad, see for example: http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2010/talks/2010-09-14-arthu...

* LuaTeX (http://luatex.org) is written in C, not WEB.

* You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTeX. All other binaries are just glue code (for example to generate missing Metafont fonts, but who wants them these days anyway?

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#22

Post by ivansavz »

In this paper[1], they say that much of the latex running time is eaten up in the startup and shutdown of the program and the actual typesetting time is in the microseconds.

A long-running process (daemon) is therefore a much more efficient way to run (La)TeX.

[1] www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb27-0/fine.pdf

""" On my current 800 MHz PC, the command

  $ tex story \\end
takes about 0.137 seconds, while

  $ tex \\end
takes 0.133 seconds. The first command typesets a small page of material; the second does nothing but start TEX and then exit. Thus, typesetting the small page takes about 0.004 seconds. """

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#24

Post by tedunangst »

nnythm wrote: post #8

the idea that LaTeX has a messy codebase is almost mindboggling to me--I had assumed that TeX--practically the only code that's published as a book (see: The TeX Book) would be clean. I guess the complaint is mostly about the Pascal + C that's code-generated by TANGLE.

No matter how pretty the ingredients are to start, once you've seen how the sausage gets made...

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#25

Post by X-Istence »

atakan_gurkan wrote: post #10

The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility. If one tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all intents and purposes, bug-free. A new implementation will certainly not be. Joel Spolsky said it very well http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I disagree that the current situation is LaTeX developers' fault. TeX and LaTeX are complex pieces of…

The big problem on tablet devices is constraints in memory. Yes the unix way is to have various small utilities work together through pipes and interprocess communications. The big challenge at that point is how to do you manage memory? What if a single process in that huge chain uses up all of the memory and another process gets killed by the OS which was part of that chain (do note, no swap on mobile devices)... How is the calling program supposed to handle one of its subprocesses suddenly dying?

Do note that the same is true on Google's Android OS. You can run as many threads as you want, but no calling other executables to do work in the background ...

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#26

Post by _delirium »

nnythm wrote: post #8

the idea that LaTeX has a messy codebase is almost mindboggling to me--I had assumed that TeX--practically the only code that's published as a book (see: The TeX Book) would be clean. I guess the complaint is mostly about the Pascal + C that's code-generated by TANGLE.

It's not so much core TeX that's a mess as the ecosystem; the set of font-generation, path-management, shell scripts, PS/PDF/DVI code, and special-purpose glue binaries gets pretty hairy.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#27

Post by pantaloons »

atakan_gurkan wrote: post #10

The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility. If one tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all intents and purposes, bug-free. A new implementation will certainly not be. Joel Spolsky said it very well http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I disagree that the current situation is LaTeX developers' fault. TeX and LaTeX are complex pieces of…

I'm curious where you get the idea that LaTeX is bug free. In my experience it is rare to find two packages that work together bug free, yet alone the collections of them needed to form even a respectable document.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#28

Post by joshu »

jsilence wrote: post #15

"iPad is the most beautiful platform out there" Sorry, but I fail to understand, why any serious TeX-Head would say that. The platform is crippled and your problem shows it. You are ranting in the wrong direction. -jsl

Please don't sign your comments here. Thanks.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#29

Post by tedunangst »

jsilence wrote: post #15

"iPad is the most beautiful platform out there" Sorry, but I fail to understand, why any serious TeX-Head would say that. The platform is crippled and your problem shows it. You are ranting in the wrong direction. -jsl

Beauty and function are measured on different axes.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#30

Post by guywithabike »

jsilence wrote: post #15

"iPad is the most beautiful platform out there" Sorry, but I fail to understand, why any serious TeX-Head would say that. The platform is crippled and your problem shows it. You are ranting in the wrong direction. -jsl

"Beautiful" has nothing to do with whether it's crippled or not. In any case, how is a 4GB executable + several-second runtime for trivial documents Apple's fault? Is the iPad crippled because it can't run a crappy cross-compiled version of OpenOffice with a PS/2 mouse?
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