I have to quibble with blazing fast. What was the resolution on an A3000 or whatever. Pretty low. My recall was the anti-aliased text rendering was technically impressive, but practically less-so due to low-resolution. A SUN or Mac was quite a bit nicer. On the Archimedes rendering against a non-solid non-monochrome color was especially nasty.

In that case, caching very expensive rendering to improve performance makes complete sense. Nice Impression summary and screenshot here. http://www.iconbar.com/forums/viewthread.php?threadid=10197 Bear in mind running on a 4 MHz ARM3 I would think.

Now, with a sufficiently high-resolution display and a performant pixel shader, all the stupid caching and hinting logic can be thrown away, and effort can go instead into optimizing this technique, with no loss of generality, when rendering to arbitrary structures in the page.