Khaled Hosny wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 01, 2011 at 08:26:38PM +0000, Joseph Wright wrote:
>> On 01/01/2011 20:18, TeXWorld wrote:
>>> Thank you Joseph.
>>>
>>> Have the LaTeX3 team ever thought of making LaTeX3 only work with LuaTeX
>>> and XeTeX ? Why ? To integrate directly into the format fontspec
>>> functionnalities for instance.
>>
>> We have not started on fonts for LaTeX3 yet, but to cut out pdfTeX
>> would be a pretty extreme move.
> 
> Just wondering, what benefit pdftex have over luatex (with the later
> being an extension of the former),

Currently: speed. luaTeX is quite slow compared to pdfTeX. (A
non-representative test gave me about a factor of 3 for a simple document)
But I still hope that there will be a boost in speed …

> or is it about people who are not
> willing/can't switch to new engine? Do we expect such people to be
> welling/able to switch to latex3 either?

That's what I alway say … With LaTeX3, nobody can (and will) claim
backwards compatibility on machine level.

cheers
Arno