KLklaussilveira·Aug 5, 2026Submission
Fontstash: Light-weight online font texture atlas builder
2 points · Open discussionmemononen
fontstash
C2021–2026
memononen / fontstash
fontstash
Light-weight online font texture atlas builder
3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
787GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Light-weight online font texture atlas builder
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-02-04 20:27:23 UTC to 2026-08-05 15:57:31 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesCaching the fonts to a texture atlas is not an unusual idea. https://github.com/memononen/fontstash is a well known example of this. Odin has a native port meant to work in conjunction with its bindings to NanoVG. The Odin code is coupled to stb_freetype.
In Drawing Text Isn't Simple: Benchmarking Console vs. Graphical RenderingWhen I needed the same thing, I took well-known implementation
https://github.com/memononen/fontstash/blob/203fec2eb6a8905a...
And ported from C to C++: https://github.com/Const-me/nanovg/blob/master/src/FontStash...
Font atlas is required to be dynamic because Unicode has too many different codepoints. Statically allocated bitmap fonts no longer work in practice. Based on the pictures in the article, it works better than what WebRender is doing.
The performance is good even on Raspberry Pi. This library https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac uses 3 of them for 2D graphics: RGBA for sprites, another RGBA for ClearType fonts, and grayscale one for non-ClearType fonts. Here's the only pixel shader that implements all 2D rendering, including text: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/Vrmac/Draw/Sha...
> a batch can only reference a fixed
Read the rest
set of resources (such as GPU buffers and textures)
Technically that’s true, but not practically. There’s GPU resource type called “texture array”. It’s possible to append new layers into an array without moving data across PCIe and back.