> Well... why not make fonts with glyphs that are say, 5000 x 5000 pixels... and then instead of rendering for a particular size, line by line, stroke by stroke

> Well... why not make fonts with glyphs that are say, 5000 x 5000 pixels... and then instead of rendering for a particular size, line by line, stroke by stroke, curve by curve, why not instead use an interpolation algorithm to shrink that 5000 x 5000 pixel glyph to the exact size you want? TrueType doesn't need a virtual machine to parse the vectors either, only to hint. Your proposal doesn't provide any hinting capability, so it doesn't solve the problems the VMs were created to solve. Moveto/lineto/curveto commands like TrueType uses are trivial and are not causing the issues here. Fonts are going to be complex no matter what, largely because of international text and advanced typographic features. The real solution is to move to memory-safe implementations.