I seem to recall a story of someone internal to Apple figuring out how to run a compiler or other batch processing system on the LaserWriter as a faster quasi-coprocessor attached to a Mac.
For the ray tracing assignment I used postscript, the PS image operator calls a function to return each sample in the image. The transform matrix made scaling the image easy.
My code was two pages long, up from one page because of the many comments. I think the next shortest was 15 pages. It also ran faster than most others because of the faster processor.
Still have no idea what the GPs point was. You can just as easily run a raster on the host, if it has bugs it has bugs, where it lives doesn’t matter.
Further rosetinting is of course that LaserWriter was $20k and it’d be a decade plus before a monochrome dropped under 1. I’m gonna guess the Canon with the shitty drivers is 10x cheaper and faster.
> most printers still render fonts and such internally.
Many printers have some scalable font rendering capability, but it is often not usable in practice for high fidelity. You absolutely can raster on the host to either a bitmap font, or make use of the PDL's native compression. Most lower end printers (which is pretty much the bulk of what is sold) do not have the capability to render arbitrary TrueType fonts, for instance. A consumer/SOHO level Canon laser using UFRII is going to rely on the host for rastering arbitrary fonts.