It's not really what the MS devs said though: "I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation"
This seems to mean, nobody has ever done that, it is a research project (a doctorate thesis must be about something that has never been researched before, at least where I live).
This particular problem cannot be a PhD subject, because it has already been researched, solved and done multiple times, by different persons and on different projects.
Someone can use the knowledge already widely available on the internet to grasp what the issue is, and implement a solution in their own project.
Years of experience aren't a PhD. Years of experience can help you understand a thesis, but only if the research doesn't exist yet, can it be considered a doctoral research project.
So the comment that the 'PhD' reference was responding to was Muratori laying out how he figured a simple terminal renderer could be implemented, using two texture lookups in a single drawcall [0].
In the course of that, Muratori allowed, almost in passing, that of course you would need, in order to do that:
> a glyph atlas encoding the cell-glyph coverage in whatever way makes it easiest to compute your ClearType blending values
Now, it does not strike me as beyond the realm of possibility that that step might be suitable for academic research. It calls for an efficient encoding of cleartype-ready glyph data with comprehensive coverage of unicode glyph space (not codepoint space). That's not trivial, and - as the DHowett reply suggests - it would take a literature review to determine if someone has already accomplished this (and he also suggested that so far as he was aware this was not how any other terminal was implemented, implying this is not simply some well known solved problem).
I mean, sure, he could be wrong about that - it might be exactly how another terminal implements it; there might already be published research on the topic; or it might just be much simpler than it appears. But it's not crazy to, on glancing at that problem, consider that it seems like it might actually require genuine original high level research.
I disagree. All this means is just putting the glyph cache on the GPU. DirectWrite (or any other font rendering API you care to use) already implements a glyph cache, and it already deals with filling in that cache gradually whenever you use glyphs not already present in the cache. And it already knows about Cleartype, or whatever form of antialiasing you prefer. There’s no research here.
This seems to mean, nobody has ever done that, it is a research project (a doctorate thesis must be about something that has never been researched before, at least where I live).
This particular problem cannot be a PhD subject, because it has already been researched, solved and done multiple times, by different persons and on different projects.
Someone can use the knowledge already widely available on the internet to grasp what the issue is, and implement a solution in their own project.
Years of experience aren't a PhD. Years of experience can help you understand a thesis, but only if the research doesn't exist yet, can it be considered a doctoral research project.