Dealing with Unicode is not the challenge that people seem to believe it is. There are edge cases where things can get weird, but they are few and those problems are easily solved.
What really got my goat about this article is that prior to the latest tested version of Gnome, the repaint rate was a fixed 40Hz! Whose decision was that?
Unicode is more challenging when you're talking about hardware acceleration. On an Apple //e, displaying a new character required writing 1 byte to a video region. The hardware used that byte to index into a ROM to determine what to display. Today's computers are faster, but they must also transmit more bytes to change the character display.
That said, I can imagine more clever uses of displays might produce significantly faster displays.
Modern video acceleration wouldn’t copy 1 byte into video memory even if we stuck to ASCII. They have to blit those characters onto a surface in the required type-face.
The extra few bytes for Unicode characters outside of the usual ASCII range is effectively a rounding error compared with the bitmap data you’re copying around.
> What really got my goat about this article is that prior to the latest tested version of Gnome, the repaint rate was a fixed 40Hz! Whose decision was that?
From a previous VTE weekly status message, leading up to the removal:
"I still expect more work to be done around frame scheduling so that we can remove the ~40fps cap that predates reliable access to vblank information." (from https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2023/10/twig-118/)
So as with a lot of technical debt, it's grounded in common sense, and long since past time it should have been removed. It just took someone looking to realise it was there and work to remove it.
That’s a valid reason to choose a repaint rate, sure, but 40Hz? It’s halfway between 30Hz and 60Hz (yes, it is) but it seems like a poor choice, to me. 60Hz would have been much more reasonable.
Also, why do userland applications need to know the monitor refresh rate at all? Repaint when the OS asks you to. Linux is a huge pile of crap pretending to be a comprehensive OS.
Yes, you're right, you're absolutely the smartest person in the industry, and absolutely everyone else doing all of this work has no clue what they are doing at all, and should absolutely bow down to your superior intellect.
You not understanding why something was done, much with your orignal comments about 40hz, doesn't actually mean that it is wrong, or stupid. It means that you should probably spend time learning why before making proclamations.
What really got my goat about this article is that prior to the latest tested version of Gnome, the repaint rate was a fixed 40Hz! Whose decision was that?