[cairo] Request: Separate FreeType and Fontconfig

David Turner david at freetype.org
Wed Mar 11 14:58:13 PDT 2009


That's interesting. I wrote my patches to not only separate the FreeType and
FontConfig backends
but also to solve an annoying thread-safety issue in the design of Cairo (at
the time). This is all explained
in the following file:

http://david.freetype.org/cairo/RATIONALE

It's been a very long time since I haven't looked at the Cairo sources, and
I don't know if the problem still
exist though.

2009/3/10 Surith <cairo at surith.net>

> >> I think there are some issues with synchronization when fontconfig is
> >> completely removed.
> >
> > Which ones ?
>
> I attempted to use Cairo in a single-threaded environment, with
> freetype but without fontconfig. As part of this I used the patches
> from David Turner. I also defined CAIRO_NO_MUTEX and built without
> threading support (--disable-pthread.) Only one font was used on this
> system - previously loaded using freetype. There were also other
> restrictions - in particular that malloc/free could not be used... I
> used custom functions to allocate memory. Cairo did run successfully
> after some hacking.
>
> I was wrong when I said that there were synchronization issues, sorry.
> I should have instead said that I had to modify Cairo, with these
> patches applied, to build and run with mutexes disabled.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/attachments/20090311/e4e77f65/attachment.html 


More information about the cairo mailing list