[OpenFontLibrary] workflow hints

[Barry Schwartz]

Fontfreedom at aol.com skribis:
> >We've got to start making these fontforge changes ourselves, but  I'm
> >not happy working on a program that is written in glorified  PDP-11
> >assembly language. Doing that is how I ended up disabled. :)
>  
> Let me guess, you wish the whole thing was written in  Python?

That's going in the wrong direction; ff's already got enough problems
due to the compiler not thoroughly checking whether the programmer is
saying something sensible. I think that's the main reason ff crashes
all the time after minor changes; in other words, through some
oversight the programmer is saying something garbled, and there are
compilers that can detect this. In Python ff would crash more cleanly,
but still it would crash; also it would be slower than molasses. I
want ff written in OCaml.

Every once in a while I glance at the fontforge code and try to guess
how much of an effort would be required. It would be much easier if
the work could be done from the bottom up, rewriting peripheral parts
in OCaml and working upwards, but calling OCaml from C is not as easy
as the other way around.