Re: [ft-devel] "Inside the fastest font renderer in the world"

[Werner LEMBERG]

> - the main strength of FreeType is not speed - though it is
> amazingly fast.  the main strength is that it has had random crap
> thrown at it for 20+ years.  Doing rendering on perfectly valid and
> good fonts is fine, so Raph's answer definitely earns its place, in
> the environment where Google concentrates on Androids, etc - make it
> very fast for *selected good* fonts.  Random crap fonts? Don't know
> how adding error recovery etc slows down the new solution yet.

This seems to be a misunderstanding.  Raph's speedy stuff is not about
parsing TrueType fonts but *rendering* outlines into bitmaps.  The
TrueType parser he has written in addition to the rasterizer was just
a proof of concept; it doesn't bring very much speed advantage.

> - the exotic language Rust. Finding people to maintain/contribute
> code written in a niche language (and quite an unusual one as that)
> is hard.  It may bit-rot if the origin owner loses interests.

As mentioned in another mail, Raph searches a volunteer for converting
it to C.  If you look at his code repository, the similarity to C is
quite high.


    Werner