[OpenJDK 2D-Dev] Thoughts about font implementation

[Roman Kennke]

Hi,

> Yep, Phil is the one who designed font management code.

I can't wait for Phil to come back and have a look at our redesign of
the FontManager related code :-) (Maybe it's not so bad that I am in
holiday then .. ;-) ). But this one here is not so much about
FontManager but more about the low level Freetype loading stuff. (I
thought that code was from you Igor? I might be wrong though).

> I remember there were some important reasons why callback-based approach 
> was introduced
> but can not recall them right now.

At least, using mmapped file/buffers looks much more elegant. And I'm a
great believer in elegant & beautiful code. And honestly, the callback
code does not look very trustworthy (storing JNI_Env in a struct and
hope it is still valid when FreeType calls back? I've shot myself in the
foot too often with such code...).

>  From the top of the head i'd sugegst to check impact of such change on 
> performance and perceived
> footprint scanning large set of large fonts.

I can do that. Any suggestions on how to do that easily? I'm not sure
how that (FreeType) implementation works, but I know at least one font
implementation that doesn't actually load anything until the
corresponding glyphs are needed (also mmap-based, very handy... this is
the code in Classpath, all Java, all nice :-D ).

>  I likely be mistaken here 
> but on some platforms
> (Windows) this might have noticeable negative consequences.

Unfortunately, I don't have a Windows box around, and can't setup one
easily. Windows licenses and VS licenses are too costly for my taste.
Also, at work, some people tried to setup a build of OpenJDK on Windows
and failed (or at least, did not succeed after 16 hours of work or so).
But I can at least test on Linux.

Cheers, Roman

-- 
Dipl.-Inform. (FH) Roman Kennke, Software Engineer, http://kennke.org
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