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This is a good question, and I'm well aware of the broad scope of my projects, especially spanning low to high level. A few things might help put this in conte

This is a good question, and I'm well aware of the broad scope of my projects, especially spanning low to high level. A few things might help put this in context. First, Druid well predated Runebender, though Runebender is now the "hero app" (before, it was xi-editor, now on the back burner). Second, I have a lot of experience doing high performance 2D and font rendering, from libart to working on the PDF 1.4 blend modes in Ghostscript to font-rs. I've also been curious about GPU for a while, not least because that was what was actually painting the text on Android, and I worked on the Android UI team for almost 5 years. So now that GPU compute is becoming mainstream, I see an almost unique opportunity to apply my skills there. Third, I'm not doing all this by myself. I'm deliberately trying to cultivate open source community involvement and, really, building a team, though it has diffuse borders. Now is also a good time to acknowledge my long-time collaboration with Colin Rofls, who does a huge amount of the day to day work on both Runebender and Druid. Lastly, I published this in advance of a career move, which is becoming a research software engineer on the Google Fonts team. I believe this is a perfect position for me to continue pushing this research agenda forward, and I'm hoping will bring more resources and focus. There is no chance of me getting bored doing this. Burnout is something I'm watching carefully, as I have experienced it (it was the end of my time on Android), but one thing I discovered in my 2.5 years away from being a full-timer at Google is that graphics research is what I love the most, and would probably be doing even if it wasn't also a good career move.

jancsika 6y ago
> a lot of experience doing high performance 2D Is there a good ELI5 about the current state of 2D GPU acceleration?
- raphlinus 6y ago
  As I posted to a similar request, this is an arcane field, and different things are meant by 2D - in games, it's largely painting sprites from sprite sheets, I think of it as involving vector graphics, and there are other contexts. I think a good blog post that motivates some of the main differences between 2D and 3D in the GPU context is this one: https://blog.mecheye.net/2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harder-than-3d-graphics/ https://blog.mecheye.net/2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harde...
webmaven 6y ago
> A few things might help put this in context. First, Druid well predated Runebender, though Runebender is now the "hero app" (before, it was xi-editor, now on the back burner). I imagine that as you're trying to build a community around the whole stack, some more "hero apps" would be welcome. What other apps would potentially align with your vision?
- raphlinus 6y ago
  I think these will emerge organically in time, but I think to really exercise the power of piet-gpu in particular, we'll want to see apps that display or visualize huge amounts of data. I'd love to see scientific visualizations.

jancsika 6y ago

> a lot of experience doing high performance 2D Is there a good ELI5 about the current state of 2D GPU acceleration?

raphlinus 6y ago
As I posted to a similar request, this is an arcane field, and different things are meant by 2D - in games, it's largely painting sprites from sprite sheets, I think of it as involving vector graphics, and there are other contexts. I think a good blog post that motivates some of the main differences between 2D and 3D in the GPU context is this one: https://blog.mecheye.net/2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harder-than-3d-graphics/ https://blog.mecheye.net/2019/05/why-is-2d-graphics-is-harde...

webmaven 6y ago

> A few things might help put this in context. First, Druid well predated Runebender, though Runebender is now the "hero app" (before, it was xi-editor, now on the back burner). I imagine that as you're trying to build a community around the whole stack, some more "hero apps" would be welcome. What other apps would potentially align with your vision?

raphlinus 6y ago
I think these will emerge organically in time, but I think to really exercise the power of piet-gpu in particular, we'll want to see apps that display or visualize huge amounts of data. I'd love to see scientific visualizations.