[cairo] Where are the stroking (and filling) guts?

[M Joonas Pihlaja]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2010, Nigel Tao wrote:

> I'd be curious to know how it compares with other rasterization
> algorithms (in quality as well as performance) whether from research
> literature or from other graphics libraries.

David Turner ran a comparison of various rasteriser implementations in 
2007 you might be interested in.  The gory details are in the rather 
long thread here:

http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/2007-July/011092.html

In a nutshell, the results indicate that the method you've implemented 
is consistently the fastest among the antialiasing rasterizers he 
tested.  It's main weakness is that summed area/cover computations 
don't account for intrapixel intersections correctly, so you get a 
certain amount of sparkle if there are many such pixels.  In practice 
you probably wouldn't notice it unless it was pointed out though.

Joonas