On the other hand, look at how ridiculously powerful our computers are and they're still so slow. We've met orders of magnitude more computing power with orders of magnitude slower software.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/24/microsoft_round_up/
And the main reason was to save memory and computing power. And even today, a GPU is designed to do graphics, that's in the name. Text rendering is graphics, so why not use it? It is more efficient than a CPU, and the reason it isn't done more isn't because one needs huge GPUs, but rather because it is more difficult for the devs.
Because CPUs today are powerhouses and text is a rather simple task, devs take the easy way and do text rendering on the CPU. But when you throw Unicode, anti-aliasing and high resolution into the mix, things that modern terminals should support, it stops being so simple, and the GPU regains value.
Since i already have one i might want to use it for other things. The reason computers are slow is this sort of "since you already have that resource, might as well use it" thinking - which makes sense if only one program does it, but if almost all programs do it then it breaks down quickly.
But the underlying problem here is higher resolution screens than needed. Most people don't actually need a 4k display. Sometimes, they can't really see small print that easily anyway and what they need is UI's designed with large print in mind.
FWIW yeah, i agree that most people do not really need 4K displays but that is another matter.
Which is exactly why you want to save the GPU for what it does best – drawing pixels.
> and pretty much every single GPU accelerated text drawing operation i've seen allocates permanent GPU resources (textures mainly).
Makes sense as a concern, and it's not something I've looked into. (I don't use alacritty.) On the other hand, how much memory are we actually talking about? On my system (total screen resolution 2880x1800), a typical terminal glyph has a roughly 14x16 bounding box; let's bump that up to 20x20 to account for padding. Stored as 8-bit RGBA, that would take 1600 bytes. An atlas of "hundreds" of glyphs would then be expected to take up on the order of hundreds of KB... which seems pretty negligible? A larger font, multiple atlases, or more characters per atlas would require more memory, but I still don't see how you get to an amount worth worrying about. I could be missing something.
Computers feel as slow as ever (which was the topic a few nodes above) despite being much faster in theory not because of a single program but because all (or well, the overwhelming majority) the programs in your computer abuse resources - even if a little. It is death from a thousand little abuses.
It seems the increase in utility we've got from being able to use teraflops of massively parallel GPU with Gigabytes of ram available - doesn't exactly match the 6 orders of magnitude or so more resource use... "It scrolls soooo smoothly, and you can use the poop emoji in your source code!!!" ;-)
</old_man type='grumpy'>
Though let's be honest here, if the OS were designed properly then the terminal application would not need to worry if there is a GPU or not. The graphics libraries and drivers should take care of all that.
In my experience GPU rendering does provide buttery smooth scrolling and output for tons and tons of text. Now you can `cat` that 1 GiB log file that much faster!
I still prefer libvte-based terminals though.
"Using the GPU for rendering enables optimizations that simply aren't possible without it"
Try making the same claim using a thrift store laptop for < $200 which is all the computing power a whole lot of people have access to (if any). Yes computing is fine (and a little better than 20 years ago) for software made and used by wealthy people. You have to slide down the curve a bit to discover the frustration with everything being terribly hungry for ever-increasing resources.
Of course if you upgrade to a top quartile computer every few years you're going to have a relatively good time.
$200 computers obey Moore's law too.
But even with LibreOffice's clunkiness, I still use it at home. While I am partial to Apple Keynote for presentations, I prefer LibreOffice Writer and LibreOffice Calc to Apple Pages and Apple Numbers, respectively. And whenever I'm on a Linux or FreeBSD machine, LibreOffice is available for me to use, while iWork and Microsoft Office are not options.
It has to support and parse a billion more formats. Including the fact that MS word file formats are in some cases literal dumps from word's memory (iirc).
Rendering things properly is also a difficult problem to solve. Look how difficult it has been for much of the 21st century, to get a webpage uniform across all major browsers, and then realised that you not only have to display the same across all major browsers, but also be 30 years backwards compatible.
While that is an additional load if you deal with those formats, the root of things like startup and runtime bloat lie elsewhere.
> Rendering things properly
These should not affect startup performance though.
i've always wondered what would happen to this sentiment if something like V8, Node, Electron or NW.js was already part of the [Windows, Linux, macOS] platforms and didn't need to be distributed with every app.
[0] For lack of a better term.
The internet might have been a mistake.