[Haskell-cafe] Re: Why binding to existing widget toolkits doesn't make any sense

[Claus Reinke]

>I should have mentioned that my tests have been done only on Windows and
> OSX.
> I guess I would have to try on a system that supports XRender to compare.
> 
> Unfortunately, the target audience of our application are mostly windows and
> OSX users, so although it would be great that Cairo performs fast on unix
> variants, it would be of little value to us, unless of course XRender also
> runs on Windows/OSX somehow :)

from the glitz page I refered to:

  The semantics of glitz are designed to precisely match the
  specification of the X Render extension. Glitz does not only implement
  X Render features like component alpha and image transformations, but
  also support for additional features like convolution filters and
  color gradients, which are not currently part of the X Render
  specification. 

  The performance and capabilities of glitz are much dependent on
  graphics hardware. Glitz does not in any way handle software
  fall-backs when graphics hardware is insufficient. However, glitz will
  report if any requested operation cannot be carried out by graphics
  hardware, hence making a higher level software layer responsible for
  appropriate actions. 

  Glitz can be used as a stand-alone layer above OpenGL but is also
  designed to act as a backend for cairo, providing it with OpenGL
  accelerated output. 

That's why it would be good to know whether glitz is still supported
(and compatible with current cairo): it, or something like it, would
provide direct access to hardware-accelerated cairo functionality on
all OpenGL platforms (without the current Haskell-land dependency 
of cairo on Gtk2hs; though software fallbacks for missing hardware 
support would seem essential).

Claus

|There seem to be some older references to an OpenGL backend for Cairo
|
|    http://www.cairographics.org/OpenGL/
|    http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/glitz
|    http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix04/tech/freenix/nilsson.html