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technicolor

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Hello, author here. Just to clarify, I wasn't saying that this has any perf impact per se. I was trying to see why syscall showed up quite a bit in the profile, when reading a large file, no matter what buffer size I pass in. Rather than spend time finishing the actual work, I spent way too much time trying to understand the reason for the limit.

Hey, thanks! I intentionally left out all the other ones. This was a deliberate reductionist view of the feature.

FWIW, Typekit has an async loader script that doesn't block the rendering. Same is the case with Google web fonts. Both services use the open source WebFontLoader[1] library behind the scenes (which is mentioned in the article).

Typekit has a feature they call language subsetting which reduces the file size of a particular typeface family by removing language support based on user selection. This can reduce font sizes quite a bit.

Google Fonts doesn't use any JavaScript (by default, anyway), which makes it faster than almost any JavaScript-enabled approach

This involves a stylesheet which means the rendering is blocked until it is downloaded and processed and the users will see a page with blank text until that happens. Sometimes it is better to show the content (even in a fallback font) instead of a blank page.

1: https://github.com/typekit/webfontloader