Comment 112 for bug 32561

(In reply to comment #27)
> gfxXftTextRun::Measure takes about 20% more time than
> nsFontMetricsXft::GetWidth (and seems to be doing about the same things).

I'd guess this is due to us forcing layout to do word-by-word measurement; going around pango seems to be an overall win though, and we can probably wait until the textframe rewrite is done to see what happens to the numbers.

There's some code to use pango-cairo in the tree right now, enabled by a #define; I'm not 100% sure it still works, but it would be interesting to fix it up and get performance numbers for using pango-cairo for everything. If we can get those numbers to be in line with the Xft numbers, then we can investigate going down the somewhat painful route of doing runtime pango version checking and using pango-cairo if it's available, otherwise falling back to pango-xft. This would mean we could have the "new-world" code in the tree, already being used and tested, letting us just jettison the old code at some point post-gecko 1.9/1.10/2.0/whatever once we're ready to increase our linux platform requirements.