[ft] Future API (was Re: Faster computation of text width?)

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Wed, 18 Mar 2015 11:54:33 +0100 (CET), Werner LEMBERG wrote:

>  There are ideas to provide a lighter interface for a
> forthcoming FreeType 3, but this won't come quickly.

Let me add a couple of suggestions for this:

* Dispose calls (FT_Done_Face etc) should accept a NULL pointer arg and
  do nothing, like the libc free(3) call does. This makes it easier to
  do unconditional cleanup of partially-allocated objects.
* FT_Reference_xxx calls should return the pointer that was passed to
  them, like Cairo does. This way you can access an object and allocate
  a reference to it in a single expression, e.g.

    my_ref = reference(get_obj(whatever));