[cairo] Serious concerns about cairo

[Vladimir Vukicevic]

On 9/23/06, Mike Emmel <mike.emmel at gmail.com> wrote:
> Now as far as Mozilla goes I've looked at their SVG implementation
> its far form complete and it sounds like they have already made a lot
> of contributions. My orginial email suggested waiting till after they get
> a reasonably complete implementation done before considering a api
> freeze. Have they told you they are far enough along that they feel like
> cairo will meet there needs ? I don't think they have done the
> animation support yet for example.  I think I've actually got a more
> complete implementation they
> they do at the moment mainly of course because I could build on the
> changes the y have already submitted.

You probably do -- we actually have very little interest in Cairo as a
SVG backend; instead, we are using Cairo as the general rendering
engine for our entire browser.  The above changes and additions were
not motivated by SVG at all; instead, they were based on things that
we needed (or thought we needed) to solve some other problems.  So
waiting for us to "finish SVG" to give feedback for cairo is probably
not useful, as that is not our goal.

> In reality you can easily support ucs2 and glyphs and this api is needed.

No, you can't.  If you do a simple ucs2 -> glyph mapping, you are
trading one toy font api for another toy font api.  Someone will run
into the same brick wall and have the same "dead code" problem that
you ran into, not to mention adding a -ton- of code to cairo that
someone has to maintain that once again doesn't actually solve the
whole problem!

    - Vlad