[cairo] Static caches and thread-safety

[John Ellson]

Keith Packard wrote:

>Around 22 o'clock on Nov 11, Carl Worth wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I'm half tempted to move the caches down into cairo_t and encourage
>>users to clone from a single call to cairo_create if they want to get
>>all the sharing benefits...
>>    
>>
>
>I think we can manage to figure out enough locking stuff to let these 
>caches be shared.  The cost of rasterizing glyphs and sending them to the 
>server is pretty high, and we certainly don't want to do that any more 
>frequently than absolutely necessary.
>
>However, all of that font stuff is X specific, and so requiring pthreads 
>(or other reasonable locking) for it to work efficiently doesn't seem a 
>strong limitation.
>  
>
Keith,

Why do you say that the font stuff is X specific?

What if I want to use cairo to generate PNG images containing text from 
a cgi-bin program on a web server
without X?    There is nothing X-specific in freetype or fontconfig is 
there?

(I don't know that I have any problem with pthreads.  I'm just 
questioning this particular argument for it.)

John