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

[Peter Verswyvelen]

Cool.

But the folks in the GTK2HS mailing list told me Glitz never really took of :-(

I hope they are wrong :)


On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 12:58 AM, Claus Reinke <claus.reinke at talk21.com> wrote:
>> 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
>
>
>