HarfBuzz
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
4recommend
2warn against
Nov 24, 2025first mention
Oct 5, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“This repository has a good outlook”
“Most of the big ones are things like skia, harfbuzz, wgpu - all totally reasonable IMO.”
Show 2 more
“I'd start with HarfBuzz: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz”
“which is kind of a big deal”
Caveats and dissent
“each of which has a rap sheet of CVEs that makes Charlie Manson look like a petty shoplifter”
“Harfbuzz (OpenType engine) WASM, which if compiled into an application allows fonts to basically run any code”
Often compared with
Threads where it came up
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- Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026) 1 mention
- Digital Printing of Arabic: explaining the problem 1 mention
- Slug Text Rendering Algorithm Dedicated to Public Domain 1 mention
- Launch HN: Cardboard (YC W26) – Agentic video editor 1 mention
Data: harfbuzz.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 12
“each of which has a rap sheet of CVEs that makes Charlie Manson look like a petty shoplifter”
“Wrapper over Slug and Harfbuzz”
“This repository has a good outlook”
“Harfbuzz is only one piece of the puzzle, it's not a text renderer, only a 'text shaper'”
“Yea, it's harfbuzz compiled to WASM”
“Most of the big ones are things like skia, harfbuzz, wgpu - all totally reasonable IMO.”
“I switched to LuaTex 1.18 including the HarfBuzz library”
“Harfbuzz also provides points along the section of text which is safe to reuse”
“Harfbuzz (OpenType engine) WASM, which if compiled into an application allows fonts to basically run any code”
“HB is implemented as just another library”
“I'd start with HarfBuzz: https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz”
“which is kind of a big deal”