[cairo] Serious concerns about cairo

[Robert O'Callahan]

On Sat, 2006-09-23 at 17:48 -0700, Mike Emmel wrote:
> Mozilla is rendering all the pages through pango on linux and
> performance and memory usage is not a problem ?

It sure is :-). This is something we're working on. We will probably end
up bypassing Pango in some cases.

> Or it sounds like your actually doing your own glyph layouts and using
> cairo from your other statements.

In some cases --- simple text --- yes.

> I think that both webkit on linux and mozilla would benefit from
> having a toolkit independent text library and I've got no choice but
> provide one.

We have a C++ wrapper around cairo called Thebes. As vlad mentioned, for
text it also wraps Uniscribe on Windows, ATSUI on Mac and Pango on other
platforms. The text API that it exposes to the rest of Gecko is under
heavy development right now. See the work in progress here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=333659
in particular gfxTextRun in gfx/thebes/public/gfxFont.h.

Feel free to copy our ideas and code but it is nowhere near stable yet.
Personally I think you should wait until we've figured out whether it
sucks or not :-).

Rob