[cairo] Re: Chaco DisplayPDF with Antigrain Internals

[M. Evans]

Ross McFarland wrote,

> they're normally not nice for libraries as they make language bindings
> very difficult.

And you expect people to infer this statement from three bang marks...wow.

This rationale for C is common, and false.  Of course, no one expects or 
wants Cairo to change from C.  (Although a safe-C treatment like CIL 
makes sense.)

A price is paid for the supposed benefits - slower development, bugs, 
low-level API mentality, etc.  The ease-of-binding claim is dubious. 
For example, an API which exposes C pointers all but guarantees that it 
will only be linked to C/C++.  Each language has to deal with the 
pointers in its own unique way, through C glue code.  I don't call that 
easy!  Now, a TCP socket which accepts string commands, that is easy 
from most any language - not that I recommend it, just for comparison.



Overall what Cairo needs is a feature matrix chart showing what exists, 
what exists partially, what doesn't exist, what will never exist, what 
might exist, and in what time frames.  I sometimes feel like I'm talking 
to Microsoft, for all the future-ware that is being promised.

Cairo is a great project, but not the only one, so it would be nice to 
get an overview "at a glance" that disambiguates future-ware from 
present-ware from nearly-there-ware from never-ware.

Another thing.  What makes Kiva / Chaco appealing (to me) is not only 
the BSD license, but the fact that it's being used in real applications, 
today.  It would be nice to see some of those apps on the web, too, when 
they come (as opposed to unit-tests and mock-ups).