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⇱ HarfBuzz 11.3 Delivers Significant Performance Improvements - Phoronix


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HarfBuzz 11.3 Delivers Significant Performance Improvements

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 21 July 2025 at 06:00 AM EDT. 12 Comments
HarfBuzz 11.3 released on Sunday as the newest release of this open-source text shaping engine. HarfBuzz 11.3 brings some nice performance improvements for this text shaping engine that is used by many prominent software programs and toolkits like Google Chrome, Firefox, GNOME / GTK, KDE / Qt, LibreOffice, OpenJDK, Godot, and many closed-source programs too like Adobe Photoshop and others.

Making HarfBuzz 11.3 quite exciting are a number of performance improvements. The new HarfBuzz 11.3 release speeds up handling of fonts with very large number of variations. Drawing can be up to 40% faster, calculating glyph extents up to 15% faster, and getting horizontal glyph advances up to 45% faster.

HarfBuzz 11.3 also speeds up horizontal and vertical glyph advances by up to 24%. Vertical text shaping is also significantly faster.

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Rounding out the release are build improvements, subsetting enhancements, improvements to Rust font functions, and various new APIs.

More details on the HarfBuzz 11.3 changes via GitHub. HarfBuzz 11.3.1 and 11.3.2 also were released as delivering some immediate fixes.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.