This is mainly from my experience developing storage engines using datafusion/polars or arrow2/arrow-rs or rocksdb-msbx.

I was changing between them and searching for comparisons online. This ended up being a massive amount of lost time because all of those choices became crystal clear when I actually roughly understood what these libraries were doing.

And actually learning the thing didn’t take as much time as writing code for comparison and discarding it or doing dead-end web searches.

Recently had a similar experience trying to learn dwarf parsing from LLMs or searching for existing code. Then I just realised that reading the spec is by far the most efficient way to understand it.

I am guessing same principle applies to text rendering because I got the same vibe when watching Raph Levien talk about it on some video.

Searching online to read some “industry-standard” “tried and true” etc. Comments is a big sign that it might be better read some actual source about the topic imo. It doesn’t even take that much time to read a textbook even.