Despite the ubiquity of text in computing applications, rendering high quality text using the GPU remains a challenging problem. Brief histories of the problem, and work done to date are discussed in this course description, and a recent blog post by Raph Levien and its accompanying HN discussion.
Patrick Walton et al. have produced a promising solution in the form of a Rust library, Pathfinder, whose general design has been beautifully documented by Nicolas Silva. Pathfinder 3 currently uses OpenGL as its GPU API, and we wondered if a port of it to more modern graphics APIs (e.g. Vulkan) might prove interesting in terms of performance results. To this end, I tried to use gfx-rs re-write how Pathfinder accesses/uses the GPU. While [progress was