Comment by ben-schaaf
16 hours ago
The alternative is that for every glyph you render the entire glyph to the screen using the Bezier curves from the font, and you end up with dogshit performance - like the new windows terminal (not sure if they've fixed it yet).
Caching glyphs is good resource management and with modern screen resolutions, color displays and subpixel-antialiasing you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
> The alternative is that for every glyph you render the entire glyph to the screen using the Bezier curves from the font
No, because you have no reason to have much more glyphs in your font cache than what fits your screen either (for people using a language with an alphabet based on the latin one at least, which is the majority of people on this website).
> you just simply need more than 70KB of RAM.
I didn't set the bar to 70kB. You also need more than 70kB of RAM yo store a full screen worth of image (which was the bar I set above).
But that doesn't mean you need 1GB either.