Re: [ft-devel] FreeType patches to support amalgamation

[Vinnie]

> From: Dmitry Timoshkov <address@hidden>

> Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 8:53 AM
> 
>>  With an amalgamated version of FreeType I can add support for hinted
>>  fonts to my open source offerings, while including the entire FreeType
>>  distribution as a single source file instead of a large tree.
> 
> How about providing a single precompiled library file for these people?

That would only work for one particular build environment, and within that
environment, only one target. For example, debug, or release. Or 32 bit versus
64 bit. If the resulting FreeType library were misused, the absence of sources
would complicate debugging. One could simply include the full FreeType
source tree but then we are back where we started. Keep in mind, I try to
target most popular platforms (Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android, GNU/Linux
with X Windows) by using a cross platform library ("Juce").

I'm sensing a lot of friction with producing an amalgamated distribution of
FreeType. Perhaps this comment will sweeten the pot:

>From http://www.sqlite.org/amalgamation.html
"In addition to making SQLite easier to incorporate into other
projects,
the amalgamation also makes it run faster. Many
compilers are able to
do additional optimizations on code when 
it is contained with in a single
translation unit such as it 
is in the amalgamation. We have measured
performance improvements
of between 5 and 10% when we use the
amalgamation to compile 
SQLite rather than individual source files.
The downside of this
is that the additional optimizations often take the
form of 
function inlining which tends to make the size of the resulting
binary image larger."