Additionally, it works extremely well with GTK 4 via Pango and you can often interoperate between the two layers if you even need to touch a hb_face_t/etc. In fact, the only time I had to mess with Harfbuzz was when integrating GPU-rendered glyphs via Behdad's GLyphy shaders.
There is an alternative from IBM, ICU, it was properly coded in C, but it was switched to toxic c++.
I mean, I don't use it, and I've been writing C for a solid 25 years, but Behdad is one of the best engineers I've ever met in my life. So I definitely don't share your opinion of the code or the quality.
Carefull, I am not saying plain and simple C is better: it is only orders of magnitude less worse as there is already way too much in its syntax. Some would call that, the "most reasonable compromise".
C++ provides features to write much safer and nicer code than with C, for the same effort, with minimal overhead. You have proper constructors and destructors, smart pointers, the STL, templates, and much more.
Your comments in this thread make no sense.
There is no opinion here, just facts: for instance, due to the abysmaly (the word is fair) difference between c++ and C, it is reasonable for a team of averagely skilled individuals or individuals to write a naive C compiler, which is absolutely not the case for c++.
If you don't want to acknowlegde this is a issue, at least I tried to open your eyes on the matter.
But I get the impression that the syntax is a fixable problem. Usually critics point so something like the template system or something.