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Re: Chameleon, graphic technology [message #2441 is a reply to message #2440]

Wed, 12 April 2006 18:40

mirek
Messages: 14261
Registered: November 2005

Ultimate Member

Well, I disagree. After one year of searching, I think that the basic drawing model should be left as it is.

There are too many rendering options now and it will be better to leave them as extensions. Adding cairo (or AGG or GDI+ or QuickDraw) as the only model would IMO have serious impact on portability and performance.

To my knowledge, far not everything is accelerated in cairo. In the end, cairo is 2D memory surface painter for many ops, just like AGG etc... In fact, using OpenGL might work as nice decceleration in many cases (because you are forced to swap memory surfaces there and back all the time).

That said, my current intentions are like this:

Current Draw model being left just where it is. Then add "extensions", like cairo. In the code it should look like this:

void MyCtrl::Paint(Draw& w)
{
Cairo cairo(w);
cairo.DoStuff()....
}

Another reason is the printing problem. I have not checked that completely, but I am afraid then when you are going to print Cairo or AGG produced output, it simply gets rendered as large bitmaps -> slow. My customers would not be pleased when waiting for large reports.

Another things to consider, quite similar, is terminal access and X11 over the NET...

By using "extended" model for parts where it is really needed only, we can (I hope) have best of all worlds...

Mirek

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