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Previously, a screen cell would occupy 28+4=32 bytes per cell
as we always made space for up to MAX_MCO+1 codepoints in a cell.
As an example, even a pretty modest 50*80 screen would consume
50*80*2*32 = 256000, i e a quarter megabyte
With the factor of two due to the TUI side buffer, and even more when
using msg_grid and/or ext_multigrid.
This instead stores a 4-byte union of either:
- a valid UTF-8 sequence up to 4 bytes
- an escape char which is invalid UTF-8 (0xFF) plus a 24-bit index to a
glyph cache
This avoids allocating space for huge composed glyphs _upfront_, while
still keeping rendering such glyphs reasonably fast (1 hash table lookup
+ one plain index lookup). If the same large glyphs are using repeatedly
on the screen, this is still a net reduction of memory/cache
consumption. The only case which really gets worse is if you blast
the screen full with crazy emojis and zalgo text and even this case
only leads to 4 extra bytes per char.
When only <= 4-byte glyphs are used, plus the 4-byte attribute code,
i e 8 bytes in total there is a factor of four reduction of memory use.
Memory which will be quite hot in cache as the screen buffer is scanned
over in win_line() buffer text drawing
A slight complication is that the representation depends on host byte
order. I've tested this manually by compling and running this
in qemu-s390x and it works fine. We might add a qemu based solution
to CI at some point.
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