Nibble Stew: Looking at the performance of Refterm
Recently a known strong-opinion-holder Casey Muratori wrote a reference implementation for a new fast terminal renderer. The goal is (as far as I can tell) to implement the same functionality as existing terminals using a lot less resources. The code is here and according to the readme it supports, for example:
The code is arranged in a very non-standard way. There are two main source files, one C and one C++ that are built with a BAT file. Those files first #define a bunch of stuff and then #include all other source code files (not header files, source files) directly. This is very old school and against pretty much any recommended best practice for C. This works will for single-person projects but is a big hurdle for any new contributors.
The build uses the /GS- /Gs999999set command line arguments, which disable security features. This seems ill-advised for a terminal application, whose main job is to parse untrusted input. All libraries used are not defined in the build file but instead as pragmas inside the source files. The program also does not link the C library and because of this has its own simple implementations of memcpy and memset . This means you don't get the SIMD-optimized versions from the stdlib (the performance impact of this was not tested).
