[lapinot]

Speed and nice error messages in (La)TeX, and to some extent ease of programming, are entirely doomed because of fundamental design choices. Being based on unhygienic macro expansion means that there is only one way to evaluate (the slow way), there will never be incremental compilation (everything can possibly be stateful in horrible ways), there will never be good error messages because there's basically no AST information anywhere (begin/end is a joke).

Regarding ecosystem: tons of undecipherable LaTeX packages are basically one-liners (ok, 10 liners) in typst. I know it from experience: I've written my PhD manuscript in typst. So perhaps one reason why there are so many (basically frozen) packages in LaTeX is because they are so hard to write and maintain.

edit: of course, being only a few years old, typst is nowhere near as solid as TeX, but you can already use it for a lot of things and its a breeze to use.

[thangalin]

> Speed and nice error messages in (La)TeX are entirely doomed because of fundamental design choices.

Have you checked out KeenType?

https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType

It's a Java-based implementation of TeX, forked from NTS, that was optimized to render 500 to 1,000 equations in real-time on commodity hardware. My text editor, KeenWrite, uses the KeenType library to preview the document. The final output is passed to ConTeXt for typesetting, by way of first converting Markdown to an XHTML file. (This means that KeenWrite can export as both HTML and PDF.)

https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html

[quotemstr]

AST information, hygienic macros, and a ton of other things can be added without starting over. What do you think of LuaTeX? I think we as an industry habitually overestimate the difficulty of evolving older platforms and underestimate the value of doing so.