A very informative tutorial on high performance edge-function based rasterization:

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/optimizing-sw-occlu...

(articles 6, 7, 8, others are not closely related)

As far as I know modern hardware has been non-scanline-based for ages btw.

Thanks, looks very interesting. But it seems more 3D-oriented than 2D oriented.

2D renderers? Do you mean rendering 2D shapes? In that case, scanline is probably the most efficient thing you can do, but most renderers are not scanline. The only modern 2D scanline renderer I know of is in the Flash Player code.

For a 3D renderer, I recommend fgiesen's series as linked above, and the older series by Nicolas Capens: http://forum.devmaster.net/t/advanced-rasterization/6145

Yes, 2d shapes. I'm writing vector drawing software and I use agg as backend (which use scanlines). In the long term it could be a good think to use or implement a more modern back-end.

Modern, fast 2D rasterization is a really hard problem, one which I'm currently writing a long-form article on. The classic Red Book stencil trick + Loop-Blinn from 2005 is the current state of the art, I think. I'd love to do more research there.

In terms of a software rasterizer, which can often be faster, it's just a matter of elbow grease and engineering. Use SIMD. Implement tons of special cases.

Write a simple polygon plotter to get you started -- just fill a triangle with white with simple edge functions. Then work your way up to arbitrary polygons. And then look into the theory behind antialiasing and such.