Re: so, is this claim about pango still true? or does nobody actually care?

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw netspace net au>]

Daniel Kasak wrote:
> Russell Shaw wrote:
>
> > I don't care how much tedious rendering pango does; if a gui isn't
> > lightning fast on a 100MHz pentium (or 25MHz 386 for that matter),
> > it's fundamentally broken in either or both design and implementation.
>
> Oh come on!
> A pentium 100?
> That's what you're using, right? Sure? Really sure? I don't believe you.
> Computers from that time are starting to pack it in. In fact, computers 
> from that time have probably *finished* packing it in.
> If anyone has a pentium 100 ( or a 25MGz 386 for that matter ) still 
> around, it's *NOT* to run Gtk2, it's to run a firewall, DNS, etc, and it 
> will not have X at all.

I'm using a pentium 166 as a dedicated mozilla machine among a few other
things.

> Everyone else ( bar the occasional minimal-freak ) uses widget toolkits 
> designed to run on today's hardware.
> God help you when XGL / Glitz arrive :)

Well, i write a lot of stuff for embedded systems, and a full windowing
graphical widget kit for a 12MHz 8bit cpu using scaleable fonts is
entirely feasible.

There is absolutely no reason for the sluggishness of graphical toolkits
on anything faster than an old 386. Excessive layers of convoluted bloat
and poor architectural design is the problem. Rendering of arbitrary unicode
glyphs is fast and easy (unlike pango). Old laptops with 1MB video ram
should be entirely useable for web browsing with mozilla and gui
word processing.