Re: Floating point in pango

[Matthew Allum <mallum openedhand com>]

Hi;

On Sat, 2006-07-15 at 18:14 -0700, Carl Worth wrote:
> >  
> > Carl, what are your thoughts on this ?
> 
> I haven't looked closely at the issue yet.
> 

Please spend some time checking Jorn's posts + profiles, hopefully they
clearly show the issue with floating point causing slowdown in the font
rendering case at least ( on ARM ).

> But my general take on this is that we are not ready to put new API
> into cairo for "performance reasons only" since we haven't
> sufficiently tried to optimize the implementation of the existing API
> yet.
> 

What do you see as downsides in extending API like this ? Would it even
be that bigger addition ? 

Id be interested your thoughts on optimising FP to perform when you dont
have an FPU. Maybe the amount of FP calls in pango-cairo could simply be
heavily reduced ? 

If Cairo cares about performing well on embedded type hardware ( maybe
it doesn't? ), use of fixed point seems pretty much mandatory on lower
end hardware - For example OpenGL ES, Playstation and Nintendo Handheld
graphics API's all use it. 

Many thanks;

  -- Matthew