resvg: worth having in Debian?

By Andrej Shadura

Yesterday I have discovered resvg, an MPL 2.0-licensed SVG rendering and optimisation library and a tool, written in Rust. It is said to be faster than some SVG renderers while currently slower than librsvg. It aims to support the static subset of SVG better than other libraries:

SVG test suite results: resvg 1272, Inkscape 967, librsvg 998

The author writes:

One of the major differences from other rendering libraries is that resvg does a lot of preprocessing before rendering. It converts shapes to paths, resolves attributes, removes groups and invisible elements, fixes a lot of issues in malformed SVG files. Then it creates a simple render tree with all elements and attributes resolved. And only then it starts to render. So it's very easy to implement a new rendering backend.

  • librsvg, currently, is heavily tied to the cairo library, unlike resvg
  • librsvg is heavily tied to GNOME which makes it painful to distribute outside the Linux ecosystem
  • librsvg doesn't really preprocess input files, rendering them as is
  • librsvg has a minimal support of the edge-cases, which leads to rendering errors

I’m thinking of packaging this for Debian, but I would be interested to know what others think of this.