[cairo] Re: Lander Game

[Niki Spahiev]

Carl Worth wrote:
> 
> It's not as obvious that there's an immediate need for something like
> this at the cairo layer. It would be possible for cairo to cache
> individual things like "the tessellation of a path" but an "object" at
> the scene-graph level could be arbitrarily more complex than that, and
> it makes sense to get the higher-level caching in place first.
> 
> If some canvas layer does a good job at optimizing redrawing like
> this, and then finds that it could still benefit from further caching
> down inside cairo, only then would it make sense to consider adding
> something to cairo.
> 
> As for doing something like a "display list" that could capture
> arbitrary sequences of calls to cairo functions, that's functionally
> similar to the cairo-meta-surface we've got in cairo now, and that we
> would like to expose at some point. The meta-surface has the potential
> to allow some very interesting things, (like vector-based patterns
> that can be transformed without bad pre-rasterization effects). But in
> general, application-specific (or canvas-specific) data structures
> stand a better chance of performing better than a meta-surface would
> anyway,

IMHO not true. Consider typical use case of mouse wheel changing zoom in 
canvas. Raster cache has no chance here.

regards,

Niki Spahiev