I worked a couple co-op work terms at Eicon Technology that made a PostScript and HP PCL interpreters for bare Canon (I think?) laser print engines. There were

I worked a couple co-op work terms at Eicon Technology that made a PostScript and HP PCL interpreters for bare Canon (I think?) laser print engines. There were hardware guys and a team of maybe 3 or 4 working on the PS one, I worked on the PCL one with another co-op on it between my terms. The HP PCL 5/5e interpreted outperformed everything that was benchmarked in a PC Mag article with the exception of memory used per character. It was especially good at not getting overrun, prioritizing printing 'just ahead' of the laser beam since only the full PS version of the hardware had a full page buffer. Later even the $10 hardware blitter got removed and had to write a pretty good software one that also did zoom enlarging. I made one contribution to the PS interpreter to speed up line join geometry calculations using first principle ratios (prototyped on my Atari 520 ST) rather than trig functions that made it orders of magnitude faster. It was a great time working close to the hardware and trying to perform as well or better as the big brand printers as well as the other competing 'emulators'.