SVG rendering - Librsvg and Lasem

[Emmanuel Pacaud <emmanuel gnome org>]

Hi,

This is a message I intended to write for some times, but the Toronto 
hackfest notes gives me incentives to actually send it.

In these notes, there is a paragraph saying Benjamin seems not too 
happy with librsvg.

And in fact, there is this library, Lasem, I have started to work on 
some years ago, that could be considered as a librsvg replacement:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Lasem
https://git.gnome.org/browse/lasem/

Good things about lasem:

- It is based on gobjects
- It has a DOM like API
- It has a quite extensive support of the SVG 1.1 specification, 
similar to librsvg
- It is as fast, if not faster, than librsvg
- It uses less memory than librsvg
- It has introspection support
- It has gtk-doc support
- There is a test suite, with an automatic check on a selection of 
test files
- As a bonus, it also renders MathML (well, it started as a mathml 
renderer under gmathml name)

Bad things about lasem:

- Text support is a joke, but librsvg does not shine here neither
- No CSS suport
- Almost nobody uses it
- There is only one developper, and not very active these days (that's 
me)
- twice the size of code compared to lirsvg (but it has mathml 
rendering...)

So I would appreciate any feedback regarding lasem design and 
implementation, or any comment about the possibility of using lasem as 
a replacement of librsvg.

Cheers,

        Emmanuel.