When rendering a pango layout CoglPangoRenderer now records the
operations into a list called a CoglPangoDisplayList. The entries in
the list are either glyph renderings from a texture, rectangles or
trapezoids. Multiple consecutive glyph renderings from the same glyph
cache texture are combined into a single entry. Note the
CoglPangoDisplayList has nothing to do with a GL display list.
After the display list is built it is attached to the PangoLayout with
g_object_set_qdata so that next time the layout is rendered it can
bypass rebuilding it.
The glyph rendering entries are drawn via a VBO. The VBO is attached
to the display list so it can be used multiple times. This makes the
common case of rendering a PangoLayout contained in a single texture
subsequent times usually boil down to a single call to glDrawArrays
with an already uploaded VBO.
The VBOs are accessed via the cogl_vertex_buffer API so if VBOs are
not available in GL it will resort to a fallback.
Note this will fall apart if the pango layout is altered after the
first render. I can't find a way to detect when the layout is
altered. However this won't affect ClutterText because it creates a
new PangoLayout whenever any properties are changed.