> 1) It's implemented in ctypes. I'm not much of a fan of ctypes, as it > has the potential to segfault in nasty ways if the API changes in any > way from what was expected (which would normally be caught at compile > time in a C extension). I'm also concerned about the overhead of > ctypes, given that there are already so many required optimizations in > the matplotlib freetype wrapper to make it fast enough. But I'm willing > to hold judgement on that until some measurements have been made. >
I would never have thought ctypes would be a problem for speed/optimization and I never benchmarked the freetype-py. Not sure how to do that though. > 2) It's not Numpy-aware. For example, it loads image buffers into > regular Python lists. This really should use Numpy for speed. Yes, and I recently discovered it may make things really slow in some cases. > 3) It exposes the fixed point numbers to Python as integers -- it should > really return all of these as floats -- the user shouldn't have to know > or remember which values are 16.16 and which are 24.8 etc. It should > just give floats. Double precision (with 52 bits in the mantissa) is > enough for any of these 32-bit fixed-point values. I think that's just a > remnant of older systems and needing to run on hardware without an FPU > that doesn't need to be brought forward into the Python wrapper. You're right. I try to keep the very-low level to stick to the freetype implementation/type and the mid-level wrapper should use float everywhere (I may need to check that). This + your comment on Google App Engine makes me think that freetype-py might not be so useful in the end. Anyway, I would gladly (try to) contribute to the new system. Nicolas ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Get 100% visibility into Java/.NET code with AppDynamics Lite It's a free troubleshooting tool designed for production Get down to code-level detail for bottlenecks, with <2% overhead. Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap2 _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-devel mailing list Matplotlib-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-devel
