SVG in GTK
28 points by calvin
28 points by calvin
I'm wondering why other svg libraries were not considered.
Also, apparently, the r in librsvg doesn't stand for "rust", but it's "Resplendent" SVG (link). This was confusing as the article mentions rust dependencies of librsvg, but also says it has been used for years in GTK 3.
librsvg is about 25 years old, it's got nothing to do with Rust. I don't think there were a lot of other major libraries to consider back in 2001 :).
Parts of it were rewritten in Rust, which has introduced the dependencies that the article mentioned. (Edit: rewriting parts of it started back in 2020, so it's a very stable library and IIRC the Rust-less branch is still usable for platforms where Rust is either unavailable or not particularly a good idea).
Even later edit: I think there's something else that the article doesn't make very obvious. librsvg is developed as part of Gnome and IIRC it always has been. The part about it being used throughout the GTK3 era refers to the fact that it was the SVG renderer used for a lot of things where previous GTK versions didn't use SVG. But it was a natural choice, librsvg had been used by other parts of Gnome for a long time.