[dale_glass]

As somebody who actually works on a pretty large program, no, I'm absolutely not going to use your 700 LOC TTF renderer. I'm going to use the 128K LOC FreeType.

Why? Well, because it's the one everyone else uses. It's what comes with everyone's Linux distro. Therefore, if there's something wrong with it, it's pretty much guaranteed it'll break other stuff and somebody else is going to have to fix that. Also it probably supports everything anyone might ever want.

If your 700 LOC TTF renderer doesn't perform as it should, it might become my problem to figure out why, and I don't really want that.

[vidarh]

I'm not suggesting you should. I'm pointing out that these things can be done with a whole lot less code. And a lot of the time so much less code that it is less of a liability to learn a smaller option. Put another way, I've had to dig into large font renderers to figure out problems before because they didn't work as expected and it became my problem, and I'd much prefer that to be the case with 700LOC I can be intimately familiar with than a large project. (I'm old enough to have had to figure out why Adobe's Type1 font renderer was an awful bloated mess, and in retrospect I should have just rewritten it from scratch, because it was shit; that it was used by others did not help us at all)

I ended up with this one in large part because it took less time to rewrite libschrift (the C option I mentioned) and trim it down for my use than figuring out how to make Freetype work for me. I now have a codebase that's trivially understandable in an hour or two of reading. That's what compact code buys you.

No, it won't do everything. That's fine. If I need Freetype for something where it actually saves me effort, I'll use Freetype. It's not about blindly rewriting things for the sake of it, but not lazily default to big, complex options whether or not they're the appropriate choice.

A lot of the time people pick the complex option because they assume their problem is complex, or because it's "the default", not on the merits.

There are tradeoffs, and plenty of times where the large, complex component is right, but far too often it is picked out of laziness and becomes a huge liability.