[cairo] Bindings and virtual functions

[Adam Lofts]

On 5/26/05, Bill Spitzak <spitzak at d2.com> wrote:

> 
> As soon as your wrapper requires virtual functions, you will start
> making code that only takes your wrapper, rather than a cairo_t, as an
> argument. This is VERY bad. The big deal with Cairo is not antialiased
> graphics. The big deal is that there is a hope that portable drawing
> functions will be possible, where the only argument is a cairo_t, and
> they will work in Qt widgets and GTK widgets and GTK canvas objects and
> in a raw XCB or Xlib program, or in a Windows .net program. If you put
> virtual functions around this you will completely kill this idea and
> that would be very bad.
> 

I'm not suggesting something like Gtk# should return an object derived from 
the Graphics object, or the Cairo bindings themselves. The reason the object 
would have virtual functions is so an application can override them itself. 
For instance, overriding the Save and Restore calls would allow an 
application to preserve extra state information. This can of course be 
achieved without virtual functions, and just calling the functions something 
else - but having virtual functions adds to the flexibility and clarity of 
the api. Neither is this a bug in Cairo since it cannot be aware of what the 
programmer wants to achieve in overriding these calls.
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