Rewrite from the ground up of the Ghostscript PDF interpreter

[Bruno Voisin]

For the TeX developers here who interact with PS, PDF and Ghostscript: a couple of weeks ago the Ghostscript developers have announced they are rewriting Ghostscript's PDF interpreter, written mostly in PostScript, entirely in C. The transition will occur over several releases and years, and is discussed in detail in an entry of the new Ghostscript blog at

https://ghostscript.com/pdfi.html

One consequence seems to be the addition, inside the GhostPDL suite, alongside gs, gpcl6 and gxps, of a new gpdf tool.

My impression is that TeX won't be affected, as TeX and friends produce PDF as output but don't use it as input. But I'm not a specialist, so I may very well be wrong. 

So if you think this is relevant and want to experiment with the future release of Ghostscript, make sure the rewrite has no side effects for TeX, an alpha gs 9.55 release is available from

https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/ghostpdl-downloads/releases/tag/gpdf_alpha1

Bruno Voisin