An Old New Adventure
raphlinus.github.io
raphlinus.github.io
But as long as we're here, feel free to AMA, and I'll do my best to answer.
But I'll give a brief teaser here anyway. The new spline is a hybrid between Spiro and cubic Béziers, with (I hope) the best features of both. Spiro is good for smooth curves but not so good when you need to crank up the tension. Béziers, by contrast, can do tension just fine, but aren't very smooth (one technical manifestation is that curvature maxima tend to happen near the segment endpoints, but rarely on them, especially for S-shaped curves).
Something that's particularly difficult for Béziers is a smooth transition from a straight line segment into a curve, which is important for U-shaped letters. Unless you take special care, the curvature jumps right up to some nonzero value at the join point. But with the new spline, it's continuous by default, unless you explicitly drag the control handles to make it not so.
It's difficult for people to learn to draw well with cubic Béziers, but obviously people climb that learning curve (so to speak) and get great results. Even so, I wonder if there's a bit of Stockholm syndrome, of being attached to that way of working just because of the amount of pain that's gone into the process of learning it.
It's a job change, but a significant one. I am mostly interested in how this affects your other projects?
Namely piet.
I wrote about this a bit in a sibling comment, but making piet-gpu real is a major goal and probably the main reason I got the gig. It's speculative in some ways because it's trying to do things in a new way, but if it works out as well as I hope, it's pretty easy to see why it's worth doing.
Converting to a texture by way of Canvas API calls won't really work with mixed directional text...
From following the links on your blog, seems like state of the art is Allsorts + Pathfinder?
It's definitely possible to build something yourself using Allsorts and other pieces, but making it all work well is a highly nontrivial task. Part of the problem is that there are a bunch of projects out there, each with their own subset of requirements, rather than one good one.
I'd like to mentor work to make this situation better, but it's too much for me to take on single-handedly.
I'm also hoping that WebGPU catches on, and we'll be able to run piet-gpu on it (through wasm). That would, I think, be compelling for a lot of interesting use cases.
I'd imagine it's also going to be needed by the Ruffle folks when they get to adding TLFText support
Maybe the Metamath community can steal a little more of your time :-), especially since there's more Rust-related work in it.
I think the "Report on the 2020 FOSS Contributor Survey" (December 2020) https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2020/12/download-the-re... is consistent with your experience: Of the OSS contributors surveyed, about 3/4ths were full time, and about 1/2 of all contributors were paid to develop OSS (almost all by their employers). The future is hard to predict, but I think those numbers are likely to increase over time. Do you agree?
I'll not speak to OSS generally, as I'm sure other people have more insight than I do, but specifically within the Rust ecosystem, I can confidently predict corresponding numbers increasing significantly.
And also thanks for the kind words about my writing. I consider education to be a pretty big part of my personal mission, and take care to write clearly, explicitly trying to minimize controversy and misunderstanding (if you optimize for clicks or number of comments, it often takes you in a different direction). And sometimes my blog posts take a long time to gestate. "The compositor is evil" was 18 months from concept to publication, 11 of which were in my private repo. It's nice to hear that people appreciate the effort.
Not that you don't have enough on your plate, but I wonder if you've been interested in doing a kind of "on writing" post where you can articulate your approach? I think your writing is unusual in that it has both specificity and approach-ability in equal measure. Like, it's precise but also friendly if that makes any sense. Definitely uncommon in any circles but more so in tech circles. (Also the layout/presentation of your blog is so nice.)
Edit: To be clear, and to quote a previous blog post of yours, "As a reader of my blog, you likely have above average ability to discern truthful information from lies, and you also probably can communicate reasonably effectively to other people." A few nuggets of wisdom on effective writing could help us trying to communicate with others. :-)
I've never experienced that and it's a shame as I think this is what true enlightenment is in a civilisation.
That's far more valuable than escaping the rat race and being loaded, blowing it on real estate and night clubs.
It's dangerous to think this way tho because you then start talking about minimum wage which only raises the cost of life for everyone else and takes the poor to really poor. It also leads to communism. Not sure if there is a utopia that isn't communistic in approach where people have the freedom to put their brains onto their topic of choice without worrying about the immediate commercial returns.