OpenGL backend (was Re: [cairo] Create a new backend)

Johannes Schmidt sdl at myrealbox.com
Mon Jan 29 14:46:45 PST 2007


On Montag 29 Januar 2007, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-01-28 at 07:50 -0500, Helge Bahmann wrote:
> > are there any thoughts if good support for external backends is a
> > worthwhile
> > thing to have, or is it considered too restraining on the internal
> > architecture?
>
> This has been discussed previously, and the response was that cairo's
> backend interface is not mature enough to expose into a stable API.  But
> it's in a far better shape these days.  We probably will expose it in
> the shape of a user-surface, not directly exposing the bare backend
> interface.

I think that was me, asking for a backend interface a half year ago.
But I've lost somehow the answer :)

Anyhow, I have recently discovered my old OpenGL backend and
updated it to cairo 1.3.

My question is:
* Is there any possibility that a new backend (OpenGL) gets into official 
cairo (marked as experimental, of course)?
* Or how long does it take for a release of a backend interface (with all 
necessary internals, i.e. tesselation etc)?

I know, there is already glitz, but it's rather cumbersome to use and needs an 
additional dependency.
This new OpenGL backend is just a few lines long and would allow using Cairo 
with any existing OpenGL context.


Best regards,
Johannes


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