Why Not Font#draw_char

Godot Version

4.3-stable

Question

I want to render a string on screen character by character for a GDExtension class

however, the Font#draw_char method has the following warning…

Note: Do not use this function to draw strings character by character, use draw_string or TextLine instead.

So I guess my question is… why? What are the performance implications/concerns of this? Looking at the c++ source, nothing stood out, but I’m not super familiar with the Godot source.

I am aware that Font#draw_string is a thing, but I want to avoid that is that I just want more control over how the text is rendered & also I’ll have a buffer of the text to be rendered in the c code, and I don’t want to repeatedly clone that to a Godot String.

Alternatively is there a different approach / function that’s possible to use for this end?

Thanks in advance