If you think about it for a second, you realize that TrueType rasterization can't be that hard because printers were doing it long ago on crappy little embedded processors, but the default is just to fall back on the big ugly library, and then wrap it and pretend it's not there. How about instead, just write some good code?
This is why 'modern' software can still manage to bring a 3GHz quad-core to it's knees, IMHO
This is also why we have many more softwares available now.
The improvement in hardware specs are so useful not only because it is faster, but also because we can do much more without having to care about the details. Writing tiny, efficient libraries is cool, but it takes a lot of time, everything else being equal, so if you can afford not doing it, you don't.
a French PhD student in signal processing at Kyoto University"
France and Japan...he hasn't exactly been living in places where English is prominently spoken with grammatical accuracy...cut him some slack. In fact, he made the exact same error of pluralizing "software" as "softwares" on his website.
You act as if I'm giving him a hard time, I'm not. I've generally found multi-lingual people want to be corrected when they do it wrong because they find it helpful; I was doing him a favor.
I personally suspect the explosion of storage space is the biggest factor in all this. I was just writing software for a uC with 2kb program space last week, and I started to bump into the limit. Optimizing my code for size actually resulted in much better code, because I had to stop and think "How can I do this... smarter?"
(Though if you're trying to fit 8kb into 2kb and have to start doing voodoo, it's true the quality will suffer)
Current software (compiled code) would usually fit perfectly in the 20Mb hard drives I was using 20 years ago. The extra space is taken by various data files. I don't think I ever cared about compiled size with PC software, even when working with 360kb floppies.
This is why 'modern' software can still manage to bring a 3GHz quad-core to it's knees, IMHO