Why are methods such as drawChar() not virtual?

[jayeye]

Is it to reduce the memory footprint on memory-starved cores? I have several good reasons to override some of them, in particular, if I'm using a monospaced font, it makes sense to be able to override drawChar() so it first clears the off-pixels of the bounding box of the largest character in the font, rather than blink the entire string.

Shall I send a pull request?

[kyle-emmerich]

Virtual functions are pretty costly even when you're writing code for high-end x86-64 CPUs. You definitely don't want that kind of overhead on a microcontroller.

In fact, on a microcontroller, I would want the smallest possible library footprint. This one is already fairly large; coupled with the driver for the display itself, I'm using about 35% of my 32K!

If you want some specific functionality, you might just want to fork it and implement it separately.