I saw the post about it earlier on typedrawers. If it wasn't because of the poster - Raph Levien - I'd just laugh it off. I'd usually be skeptical of such a claim - because, in the end of the day, everything is machine instructions, right? Shouldn't make any difference what language something is written in, if your compiler is good enough. I trust Raph made a valid claim though. However:
- 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. - 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. It is hard enough to find people to contribute to the font validator, which is in C#, rather common in windows land; and C# is close enough to both Java and C, etc. Rust I heard is similar to Objective Caml, which is in turn similar to haskell... (I heard!). _______________________________________________ Freetype-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freetype-devel
