[cairo] Win32/OpenGL

[Owen Taylor]

On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 17:29 +0100, Jonas Beckeman wrote:
> (second attempt; seems replying to cairo-list mails goes to the sender
> instead of the list... Strange)
> 
> Can't you use WPF as the backend? Should be a lot easier than DX, and you'll
> automatically get HW acceleration or fallback to software. I think.
> It'll probably be a while before the majority of XP users have installed
> WinFX, but if the implementation is significantly easier it might be a
> tradeoff that makes sense?

In general, implementing Cairo on top of a high level API is not easier
than implementing it on a low-level API. Cairo already has the code
to take high level operations and reduce them down to a low-level, so
you generally are just fighting an "impedance mismatch" between cairo
and the high-level API.

We've been building some infrastructure for handling such a mismatch
where it isn't avoidable ... PS/PDF/GDI printing; but where we have
access to a pixel-level API that exposes the capabilities of the 
hardware, it's going to be easier and more efficient to use that.

That isn't to say easy - glitz (cairo low-level => OpenGL) is a big
chunk of scary code, and while I expect Direct X to be a bit easier,
it's still going to be some work.

Regards,
						Owen