GSoC 2022: Alternative Rendering Engines

[Matsumura, George]

Greetings,

I am an individual who would be interested in the project "Integrate 
FreeType with alternative rendering engines" listed on FreeType's GSoC 
page. There were multiple things in the blog post that the entry linked 
to that I found interesting/had questions about.

The blog post mentions "a large constant factor because it’s doing 
complicated exact-area calculations for each pixel" as a performance 
impediment when drawing into the accumulation buffer. If one were 
willing to settle for fewer gray levels in the resulting image, could 
something like multisampling be used to eliminate the need for these 
area calculations entirely, especially given that SIMD is already being 
used to exploit parallelism? I'm sure there's a reason why this isn't 
done, but if someone could enlighten me as to exactly why I would highly 
appreciate it.

I would assume the parsing efficiency improvements mentioned in the blog 
post wouldn't really be applicable to FreeType, as parsing in such a way 
would inhibit more complex intermediate processes such as hinting that 
font-rs doesn't seem to do. Please correct me if I am wrong here.

Would use of SIMD entail an approach like that used by pixman, where 
hand-coded assembly is made for each SIMD instruction set extenstion? If 
so, which extentions would be pursued. I personally would love to try 
and learn to write optimized routines in assembly with less-used 
extensions like MMX or PowerPC AltiVec, but I was curious as to how 
relevant these platforms are viewed as.

About me, I am an undergraduate physics/engineering student at a 
mid-size university in the United States. I have made contributions to 
the Cairo vector graphics library before, although the part I 
contributed to is not widely used. I am hoping that at least some of 
this knowledge will be applicable to the task at hand.

I apologize for how behind I am in the proposal process. If it is still 
workable for me to submit a proposal this late, I very much look forward 
to learning more about and working with FreeType and its community. In 
any case, I am grateful for the effort taken to present this wonderful 
opportunity.

Regards,
    George