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

[Ken Sharp]

At 09:09 05/08/2016 +0100, Graham Asher wrote:

> I see your point, but I think that adding obfuscation (the extra 
> complexity introduced by using C) to the code to support a tiny and 
> vanishing minority of systems without C++ is not worth the bother; such 
> systems would very probably not be able to run FreeType in any case 
> because of lack of support for 32-bit integers; and I doubt very much 
> whether they would have any need to rasterize glyphs.

Speaking for Ghostscript, this is not the case. We are required to support 
a number of embedded operating systems, many of which are of some degree of 
legacy and which have limited (if any) support for C++.

These platforms drive printers, which very much do have a need to render 
glyphs :-) Please don't assume that all glyph rendering is for screen display!

I no longer have responsibility for FreeType in Ghostscript, but if FT were 
to move to requiring C++ I think we would have to fork it (as we did once 
before) in order to maintain a pure C build. Personally, as one of the two 
people who did a load of work to get FreeType integrated into Ghostscript 
in place of the (old) fork that was being used, I'd be very disappointed to 
have to go back to using a fork.....


                        Ken