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by SahAssar 1391 days ago
Most graphical markdown renderers seems to convert markdown to html and then render that html using a browser engine. This includes basically any based on electron (vscode, atom, obsidian, roam) and a lot of others that do it via platform web views.

The point of the browser-less claim is that it converts the md to html the same way most existing engines do, but then does not use a browser engine to render it, instead using something faster and more purpose-built.

As for the GPU-thing I'm not sure, but for example terminals are sometimes written to take advantage of GPU's (kitty for example: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/#design-philosophy ) so why not this?

1 comments

Something like a simple markdown renderer has little reason to use the GPU. But a terminal emulator has absolutely no reason to use one. The bottlenecks there are system I/O and legacy API's, not the rendering performance.
The terminal statement is false. In fact I contributed an Alacritty feature that stopped rendering when the window was occluded that cut CPU usage from ~10% to ~0.4% when not visible. There's also a misconception on what GPU's are useful for. Being the graphics processing unit they are much faster for processing images and glyph graphics then the cpu.