Today's Deep-Dive: Harper

The Deep Dive explores Harper, an open-source, privacy-first grammar checker developed by Automatic, the company behind GitHub. Harper addresses the ‘triple threat’ of modern editing software: poor privacy, bad performance, and unnecessary cost. Unlike cloud-based tools like Grammarly, which send user data to remote servers, Harper operates entirely offline, ensuring complete privacy. It also outperforms the major open-source alternative, LanguageTool, which is resource-intensive and slow. Harper achieves this by using carefully optimized, hand-crafted rules and efficient algorithms, all built with the programming language Rust. Rust’s memory safety and speed contribute to Harper’s impressive efficiency, using less than 150th of LanguageTool’s memory requirements. Harper is also portable, able to run via WebAssembly, making it easy to integrate into various applications. The project is open-source under the Apache 2.0 license and has gained significant community support, with extensive documentation for integration into major text editors. Harper’s commitment to performance and privacy makes it a promising solution for users concerned about data security and efficiency.

• https://writewithharper.com/