> wouldn't 20 y/o open source software as prevalent as FreeType have optimized those code paths? The tradeoffs that made the most sense 20 years ago are not th

> wouldn't 20 y/o open source software as prevalent as FreeType have optimized those code paths? The tradeoffs that made the most sense 20 years ago are not those that would lead to the fastest implementation on current hardware. This is not so much the Freetype is unoptimized, it's that old, possibly wrong optimizations are pretty much baked in now... Modern CPU have massively more cache and have vectorization instructions, which make the optimal solution very different from the one optimal for the Pentium II that was top of the line when Freetype was first conceived... It's also acceptable to use vastly more memory, Freetype dates from a time where a beefy desktop machine had maybe 32Mb of RAM...