Re: Unify the Platforms: Cairo+FreeType+Harfbuzz Everywhere (except TTY)

[Eli Zaretskii]

On May 17, 2020 5:09:08 PM GMT+03:00, Arthur Miller <address@hidden> wrote:
> Julius Pfrommer <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Hi all,
> >
> > during the recent discussion on "Emacs being too square", I recalled
> a
> > few projects that use OpenGL for terminal emulators [1,2]. With good
> > performance, smooth scrolling and the possibility to add more visual
> > *bling*.
> >
> > I had a good look at Emacs' code-base to see if similar approaches
> > could be used. As you can imagine, I got lost in a forest of #ifdef
> for
> > different platforms and GUI toolkits. The code looks scary to touch.
> If
> > you don't have access to *all supported platform*, it is likely that
> > changes break a platform you could not test locally.
> 
> I have been looking into same, some time ago and recently, and I
> experience same problem. A forest of cases, all coded into same place
> in
> giant files of 5K+ lines :-).
> 
> > To make the code-base less scary, there should be more code-sharing
> > across GUI platforms. And this is indeed possible!
> Emacs and Emacs src could benefit of some modularization and
> refactoring
> definitely.

I suggest to go through the archives and the Git logs to see how many such 
efforts have been made and are already in the codebase.  It isn't like the 
advantages of this are unclear to the development team, or that nothing is 
being done in that direction.  Far from it.