Re: [ft-devel] "Inside the fastest font renderer in the world" (Re: Freetype-devel Digest, Vol 139, Issue 3)

[Patrick Lam]

In case anyone is curious about Rust, I just looked into it in some
detail recently. You can program it imperatively, although it also
supports most features of functional languages. There will be less
culture shock coming from C to Rust than from C to O'Caml for sure.

As I alluded to earlier, Rust does better at memory management than C,
and the compiler enforces the memory management for you without
garbage collection and without refcounting. But everything has to have
a single owner. (This can cause some learning curve). The compiler
knows when things are no longer referenced and then deallocates them.

pat


On Thu, Aug 4, 2016 at 8:24 PM, Hin-Tak Leung
<address@hidden> wrote:
> 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!).
>
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