logoalt Hacker News

fluoridationyesterday at 9:43 PM1 replyview on HN

"Rasterizing" means just one thing in this context: to transform a data structure into an array of pixels. It seems absurd to do this, given that the next step must be to convert back from pixels to text data, but maybe they have some way to generate predictable sequences of pixels (e.g. the character "t" is always rendered as the same pattern of pixels), such that they're cheap to convert back.

If they're doing anything else, the word "rasterizing" is being misused.


Replies

fc417fc802today at 12:51 AM

Yes, the much more plausible explanation is that the word rasterize was misused there. They are generating and diffing text data which has been a standard approach to drawing a TUI since the dawn of computing. It is not even remotely resource intensive.

show 1 reply