Re:Kitty 0.17 – GPU-accelerated terminal emulator
by mgaffney on Thursday March 26, 2020 @02:26PM
(#22696374)
> https://danluu.com/term-latency/
This was written in 2017. It's got great information but I'm guessing most, if not all, of the terminals tested have newer versions. Just think of what 3 years of feature bloat could have done to their performance.
Re:Kitty 0.17 – GPU-accelerated terminal emulator
by einpoklum on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @08:12AM
(#22683806)
Wow, those graphs are mind-blowing!
But it sounds like what should really be written is a fast, hardware-backed, low-latency but limited-feature graphics library.
Then have your terminal use that. I still say that direct awareness of the hardware is _way_ too much coupling.
Re:Kitty 0.17 – GPU-accelerated terminal emulator
by jstimpfle on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @05:20PM
(#22688630)
OpenGL is actually pretty high-level. I don't know how much detail of the hardware it lets you get - probably mostly through hardware-specific extensions. The most basic usage is really hardware oblivious. There are many even more high-level toolkits on top of that, such as Qt. But if you need some flexibility and performance, using OpenGL is probably your best bet.
https://danluu.com/term-latency/
> A graphical terminal emulator should use underlying graphical environment features/libraries for things like hardware-assisted rendering.
I've mostly done OpenGL recently, and I think xterm (which is fast) is an exception in that it uses just X11 primitives, but I also know that some font frawing APIs are very slow. GDI is what I have in mind mostly. So using Hardware more directly (i.e. OpenGL) might be not the worst idea.