Re: ReactOS: stack vs heap


>> I will try the dynamic heap allocations for the rendering
>> buffer. This might be the largest of them, I think. In addition,
>> this should help with the rendering speed when rendering complex
>> shapes like
>> https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cabin+Sketch. Currently, FreeType
>> makes several attempts until a sub-band can fit into a static stack
>> buffer. We should be able to fit it into a dynamic buffer easily. I
>> wonder if CabinSketch should be about as complex as we can tolerate
>> and refuse anything much more complex than this. A lot of time-outs
>> will be resolved...
> 
> Perhaps a hybrid approach is the right one: Use the current
> infrastructure up to a certain size, being as fast as possible because
> dynamic allocation overhead can avoided, and resort to dynamic
> allocation otherwise.

Werner, 

FreeType is not shy about allocating buffers to load a glyph. This is just one more I highly doubt that it matters even at small sizes. We always allocate FT_Bitmap even for rendering too. As a matter of fact FreeType loses to the dense renderers when rendering complex glyphs precisely because of multiple restarts to fit the small buffer.

Alexei