i think you mean the devdraw lempel-ziv compressed images. font images are just images really (on the memlayer below devdraw), and i also tried to understand the compression code (the first i ever looked at), but couldn't. they did recommend to read that original paper by lempel-ziv and i didn't - probably i am at fault.
i agree there is inperfection. i find it entertaining to find the historic reasons how it became like this, and having this excuse doesn't lessen their work's quality. i truly think there is some amazing stuff to learn from plan9 design, but technologic change in the meantime makes a lot of these things less obvious. a lot of us younger people have an intuitive understanding only of newer hardware, and no idea about older bottlenecks, obvious back then. hence my asking here. trying to check my (i admit somewhat phantastic) theories :) > given that Plan 9 is so much simpler than the more popular OSes around, how > is it that it does not outperform them? it does here. disk access on linux is sooooo much higher latency indeed. it's truly mind-boggling. my suspicion is that this helps protect the linux disk performance engineer jobs. we have met such a fellow once during some 9front benchmarking next to the billiard table. he overheard our conversation and wanted to offer his services. very nice guy even. probably best for him that he doesn't know... > why isn't there a Plan 9 tool that can beat Skype at at least the texting > portion of its game you HAVE to try the hubchat on mycroftiv's grid!
