Re: Sibelius Software UK office shuts down

[David Kastrup]

Lucas Gonze <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 9:22 AM, address@hidden
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> It is very difficult.  It's better to use a front-end editor that
>> shows some sorta mock-up of the score and that only compiles the
>> nice LilyPond version from time to time (if this exists).  Getting
>> an actual LilyPond score requires calculating line breaks and
>> there's no way to get rid of the overhead.  That said, we optimize
>> all the time: I believe that for larger scores w/ many staves, the
>> current development version is faster than 2.14.
>>
>> As for the svg, significant improvement can be made in the speed of
>> LilyPond's svg export - contributions are certainly welcome in this
>> area.  The backend is very well written but it is all in Scheme and
>> can be quite slow as it does not make reference to an external font
>> file but rather draws out every glyph.
>
> It wouldn't make sense to have completely separate codebases for
> quick-and-dirty and slow-and-pretty.

It is what LyX does with regard to LaTeX typesetting.  The
counterthesis, in a way, is TeXmacs, but it does not use TeX for
typesetting, it only employs its algorithms.

> IMO this is the blocker.

It is quite hard to turn a whole program into something matching the
requirements of a GUI workflow.  The mockup route will certainly deliver
results quite faster.  It is conceivable to combine it with a lazy
update/preview scheme running in the background, but for interactive
response you'll want something faster.

> Lilypond's C could be converted to Javascript using Emscripten. Is
> there any hope of that working with the Scheme?

That reminds me of a man bringing a fried chicken to the vet and asking
whether there is anything he can do.

No, LilyPond C++ is not idiomatic C but a rather low-level
intertwinement with Scheme.  It is not really susceptible to machine
translation by other paths.

-- 
David Kastrup