Re: [ft] Question about porting source code to C#

[R0b0t1]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 1:40 PM, Александр Струняшев
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello.
>
> For current project in our company we are needed in FreeType library to 
> render glyphs. Project written in C# and should work on Windows and Linux. We 
> tried with unmanaged libraries using Marshaling and everything worked well.
>
> Unfortunately for our project we could use only managed code. And that means 
> that current implementation is not really fit our needs. We are thinking 
> about porting C++ code to C#.
>
> So I would like to know about this possibility. Could we do it or is there 
> any license restrictions? We plan to use our project in commercial goal and 
> sell it.
>

I expect you can recreate the rendering engine in C# and then use it,
but it may not be performant and as mentioned it will be very hard to
maintain. Your best option is to use the native libraries regardless
of what anyone else thinks you need to be doing. Using only managed C#
will cost your company hundreds of thousands of dollars in
non-recoverable engineering costs.

The alternative is to use the font rendering built in to .NET/Mono,
but since you are here I suspect you have found it does not work very
well.

Well written C++ to C# is not pretty. Every time I have seen something
similar done it has been a waste of time, especially when it is merely
to have the code be written in Y instead of X, not for any other
benefit conferred by the rewrite.

Cheers,
     R0b0t1