Billions Read His Code. 7 Days in Prison. No Regret.
Four agents. Evin's Ward 2A. Eight-hour interrogations. They wanted an informant on activists in three countries. He refused. Five years later, his code shipped.
Billions of screens. One engineer. Seven days in solitary confinement.
The story could have ended very differently in January 2020.
In January 2020, four plainclothes agents from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps stopped him on a Tehran street after lunch with his father. The Guards are Iran's elite paramilitary force, separate from the regular army, answering directly to the Supreme Leader. Imagine if one organization combined the US Army, the CIA, parts of the FBI, the Border Patrol, a federal prison system, several Fortune 500 companies, and all of it answered directly to a single religious leader rather than the president or Congress. That is the Revolutionary Guards.
A week later, he walked out of that wing, Evin Prison's Ward 2A, where Iran holds the people it wants leverage over, not just punishment. The goal when they put someone there is usually not a trial. It's a televised forced confession, an informant recruitment, a hostage to trade in future prisoner swaps, or pressure on diaspora networks abroad. They wanted him to become an informant on pro-democracy activists in Canada, the US, and the UK...
He refused.
Five years later, he and a small team shipped GPU-accelerated text rendering to the world.
His name is Behdad Esfahbod. The software he authored is called HarfBuzz. If you have ever read an English tweet, a German news site, a French novel on a Kindle, Arabic on a phone, Hindi on a billboard, or Persian on a book reader, his code was there. HarfBuzz is the text-shaping engine inside Android, Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, GNOME, KDE, LibreOffice, Figma, Canva, Godot, Unreal, Unity 6, Amazon Kindle, PlayStation, smart TVs, and the dashboard of the car you drove today. Even on iPhones and Macs, where Apple's own CoreText handles system text, the Firefox, Chrome, LibreOffice, and Adobe apps you open bring HarfBuzz with them.
The GitHub repository has around 5,500 stars. That is a modest number for a project this important. That is also part of the story.