[Xr] Few fundamental questions

[Carl Worth]

On May 19, port001 wrote:
 > GTK2 is a lot worse than Qt 2D performance wise, so this is why I
 > am very interested in Xr.

So far, the emphasis in the development of Xr has been on the
high-level API and in the specification of some low-level primitives
along with reference software implementations.

Performance has not yet been an emphasis, so I won't make any
performance claims about Xr at this time.

However, Xr has been architected in a way to allow multiple backends,
any of which may be able to accelerate some operations with graphics
hardware. One such backend is already implemented using the X Render
Extension. It has also been proposed to make an Xr backend using
OpenGL. Volunteer help here would be most welcome.

 > First of all, am I going to see a difference in applications that haven't
 > been written using Xr?

Xr is a client-side library. If your applications don't link to it,
then you won't be using it.

 > Will I see any speed improvements from GTK2 widgets?

No.

 > Or does GTK2 need to be modified to take advantage of Xr

Yes.

 > or does Xr add itself as a core layer to XFree eliminating the need
 > for front-end modification software?

No.

Thanks for your interest.

-Carl

-- 
Carl Worth                                        
USC Information Sciences Institute                      cworth at isi.edu