[cairo] pixman?

[Soeren Sandmann]

Thomas Stover <thomas at wsinnovations.com> writes:

> So what you are saying is - don't use it?

Basically, yes. Much, though not all, of its functionality is
available through cairo already.

At some point I think it may make sense to make pixman a
general-purpose low-level painting library, but there is a bit of
historical cruft in it that we need to get rid of first.

> So I am also to understand
> that with cairo, pixel level manipulation should be done exclusively
> by manipulating buffers returned by cairo_image_surface_get_data()?
> (not that it is a problem) One more for the curious George - so what
> this does is utilize X Render for accelerating certain surface
> operations on xlib / xcb back ends? Is this information that users of
> the cairo api at the front door need to take into consideration, or is
> this something we can just not worry about?

I'm no sure what you are asking here. The cairo xlib/xcb backends will
use the X RENDER extension which may or may not be hardware
accelerated.

The performance of the X backends is currently essentially
unpredictable. It varies from unusably slow to very fast, depending on
the combination of server, driver and hardware you will be using.

The image backend has predictable and usually acceptable performance,
but it is not hardware accelerated.


Soren