VIvidarh·May 22, 2025
For the glyph regeneration, individual characters is more than fast enough - TrueType is actually quite simple to rasterize [1] (if you ignore things like hinting, which you increasingly might as well on 4k displays etc.; also: if you ignore emojis, which involve an embedded subset of SVG in the font file... eww). It's really just if you have a screenful of previously unseen glyphs you'd get a very brief slowdown. You could warm the cache if you wanted, but in practice I can increase/decrease the fontsize with a screenful of text in my terminal without it being slow enough to be worth optimizing more.
> I had forgotten or didn't know that you'd also written a pure Ruby replacement for Xlib!
That one is not all me. I've just filled in a bunch of blanks[2], mostly by specifying more packets after the original maintainer disappeared. I keep
Read the rest
meaning to simplify it, as while it works well, I find it unnecessarily verbose. I'm also tempted to bite the bullet and write the code to auto-generate the packet handling from the XML files used for XCB.
I think there's large parts of X11 that are broken, but the more I'm looking at my stack, and how little modern X clients use of X, the more tempted I am to try to write an X server as well, and see how much cruft I could strip away if I just implement what is needed to run the clients I care about (you could always run Xvnc or Xephyr or similar if you want to run some other app).
That would make it plausible to then separate the rendering backend and the X protocol implementation, and toy with simpler/cleaner protocols...
[1] https://github.com/vidarh/skrift
[2] https://github.com/vidarh/ruby-x11