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The Next XFree86 Wars: XFT2 vs STSF
NoSun writes "Sun's latest project is to create a font library for XFree86, named Stsf, that would replace Fontconfig and Xft2. But the big question is: Does the world need yet another X font library that would create more incompatibility and fragmentation? Well known Gnome and GTK+ developers are against this (yet another) X font library which just re-invents the wheel one more time with the result of slowing down KDE and Gnome in the desktop race. "
- If Sun's project is vastly inferior, no one will use it and it won't cause "fragmentation".
- If Sun's project is vastly *superior*, then the people who switch to it will enjoy a great implementation. You shouldn't force Sun to collaborate in this case. Mozart's compositions wouldn't be as good if he had been forced to "collaborate" with the inferior composers of his time.
- It's only if Sun's project is "comparable" to previous projects that it will cause fragmentation.
A leg up isn't sufficient. Problem is, a lot of technologies in the font rendering area are patented. For instance, there is no _really_ good hinting engine enabled for truetype fonts, simply because it's patent ecumbered and would require licence fees for every desktop using it. That is not to say a hinting engine isn't available, just that it's not compiled in...
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
From Sun's side-by-side comparison, it seems like Xft2 is a carefully designed project taking into account the needs of application designers to reach a clearly defined goal, whereas Stsf is has vaguely-defined and excuses its unjustified design with a lot of buzzwords.
Xft2 is slightly inferior in that it doesn't have a way of communicating the data to the server pre-rasterization, so that the server can use hardware acceleration in the rendering process. Of course, there's no particular reason that, once XRENDER is complete, this couldn't be done.
From all indications, it appears that stsf uses FreeType as a backend renderer. FreeType, in recent versions (2.1.3, 2.1.4) is extremely good. Have you taken a look at it lately?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That means STSF doesn't have to be just a little bit better, it has to be VASTLY better to justify ripping out a brand new font architecture. Nobody is convinced it is.
Other people seem to be of the belief that having 2 competing font systems is ok. It's not - this is two competing interfaces, NOT implementations. Well, STSF can apparently emulate Xft, but you don't get any advantages that way, so what's the point?
So STSF had better be pretty amazing to justify it. Sure, Sun can go and use it if they like, but it'd require major b0rkage of GTK, and those patches would probably not make it back into the trunk, so they'd have basically forked GTK. Not good.
Unfortunately the fact that X sucks is being used to force very bad ideas (such as toolkits in the server) that would condemn Linux to being totally unable to compete with any platform that allows innovation in the user interface.
What X needs is easy to program for and advanced rendering capabilities. I can draw a damn button, what I can't draw right now is UTF-8 text. Programmers using "consistency" as an excuse to force people to use their own implementation of a button, rather than getting to work on hard stuff like rendering, are causing more damage to Linux (and Windows, too!) than anything.