What does HackerNews think of pathfinder?

A fast, practical GPU rasterizer for fonts and vector graphics

WezTerm is a GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator written in Rust | Mar 2023
Expand Context ↕
> but for text glyph rendering the setup costs would be higher than letting the CPU do the job

Depends on how the glyph rendering is done. Modern GPU glyph/vector renderers like Pathfinder [1] or Slug [2] keep all the data on the GPU side (although I must admit that I haven't looked too deeply into their implementation details).

[1] https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder

[2] https://sluglibrary.com/
Chrome extension manifest v3 proposal: comment from uBlock author | May 2019
Expand Context ↕
Really hoping WebRender, and eventually Pathfinder make a big difference here.

https://github.com/servo/webrender

https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder
Blend2D – 2D Vector Graphics Engine | Apr 2019
Expand Context ↕
Pathfinder fits the description: https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder

This AR demo on MagicLeap shows the potential: https://twitter.com/asajeffrey/status/1106667615622180864
Microsoft’s HoloLens 2: a $3,500 mixed-reality headset for the factory | Feb 2019
Expand Context ↕
This challenge is one of the reasons we're so excited about pcwalton's work on Pathfinder (https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder )
Flat Design vs. Traditional Design: Comparative Experimental Study (2015) | Jan 2019
design is about solving problems given constraints. flat design is oftentimes (more-so in the past than right now) a reasonable solution for the web, due to constraints related to latency (sending graphics over the wire) and the computational cost of rendering complex graphics/interfaces. from that perspective, flat design makes total sense to me, even if I don't always care for it personally. browsers can't even agree on how to render vector graphics or what falls on CPU vs GPU. projects like pathfinder[1] are sorting some of that out, but we've got a long way to go. flat design is only a very small percentage about aesthetics.

IMO, flat design takes the "best for the most for the least" approach of charles and ray eames (and so many others who followed the same ethos but maybe stated it less eloquently), and perverts "the least" to mean least amount of effort/money for the computer (or, cynically, the designer as well), rather than for the user. it either skews the idea of a design constraint, or highlights problems with the web as a platform. whatever flat design accomplishes, it isn't perfect for all cases, but it isn't necessarily bad, either. we just have to remember that as technologies mature, it's always possible we're designing for constraints that no longer exist.

I say this a lot, but when talking about web design, in retrospect, flash was like future alien technology that got taken away from us. although I understand the attack surface that came with it and why it had to go.

1. https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder

Firefox about:config privacy settings | Sep 2018
Expand Context ↕
Sorry to hijack this thread, but I noticed in your presentation (can't find it now) you could test out pathfinder with --features=pathfinder on Firefox Nightly. Any way to tell if this really enables pathfinder? I ask because I can't tell a difference on Windows or Mac (which may mean it's working as intended).

https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder
Xi: an editor for the next 20 years [video] | Jan 2018
Expand Context ↕
That's where pathfinder [1] comes in, as the fastest font rasterizer, utilizing the GPU and built in rust. (not affiliated). Ok maybe I'm overselling just a little but it's exciting!

[1]: https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder
Skia: an open source 2D graphics library | Jan 2018
Expand Context ↕
The Firefox and Servo team are currently hard at work on Pathfinder, which should solve this for both fonts and SVG. It'll run on the GPU like WebRender which is super exciting: https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder - alas it's still a WIP at the moment.
The web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank | Oct 2017
Expand Context ↕
On Ubuntu 16.4 LTS, I just now installed rust nightly[1], and pathfinder[2], and the three demos appear to work in the default firefox 56, but not in chromium 61.0.3163.100[3]. Disk usage was half GB, split between ~/.cargo and pathfinder/ . Time was... less than a snack. My GPU was integrated Intel HD 520. I already had npm 3.10.3.

[1] https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/install.html Select 2, for custom install, and change to "nightly". My host triple was x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu. [2] https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder [3] TextDemoView.initContext (view.ts:324) Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Cannot read property 'createQueryEXT' of null .

EDIT: The three demos are: some text; the SVG tiger; some planar text in 3-space.
The web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank | Oct 2017
Expand Context ↕
FTA: https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder
The web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank | Oct 2017
Expand Context ↕
See the README: https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder
Introduction to WebRender | Sep 2017
Expand Context ↕
pcwalton is on the ball, as usual: "Pathfinder is a fast, practical GPU-based rasterizer for OpenType fonts" (and written in Rust) https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder
App sizes are out of control | Aug 2017
Expand Context ↕
pcwalton's project Pathfinder (https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder) may eventually lead to an efficient GPU-based vector renderer, which would make this feasible.
Terminal and shell performance | Jul 2017
Expand Context ↕
> If I could draw a whole frame in a reasonable amount of time, this problem would be much easier! But I can't. Using Core Text, it can easily take over 150ms to draw a single frame for a 4k display on a 2015 macbook pro.

Holy cow! I wonder if iTerm2 would benefit from using something like pathfinder[1] for text rendering. I mean, web browsers are able to render huge quantities of (complex, non-ASCII, with weird fonts) text in much less than 150ms on OS X somehow; how do they manage it? Pathfinder is part of the answer for how Servo does it, apparently.

[1]: https://github.com/pcwalton/pathfinder