[cairo] misc. cairo_t questions

[Roger Davis]

Hi all,

I am new to this list, please forgive me if the following material is
repetitive. I am about to port several substantial Xlib/Motif programs to
gtk3/cairo and have a few general questions about cairo. (Because all
Xlib drawing is pixel-addressed and it will be easiest for porting purposes
to preserve this pixel addressing as much as possible, I suspect I will be
using no transformations of any kind, which might have some bearing on
these questions.)

(1) My first question is relating to optimal usage of cairo_t context objects
in terms of performance and any other issues which might be of concern.
My existing Xlib drawing code utilizes many (a few dozens of) GCs to draw
to off-screen Pixmap objects with various foreground colors, line widths,
etc. GCs are relatively inexpensive objects in Xlib-land, can I assume that
cairo_t objects are similarly cheap for cairo drawing? I will be drawing to
ARGB image surfaces, and for reasons of programming simplicity would prefer
to allocate a couple dozen cairo_t objects for each image surface and keep
the rendering attributes of each invariant, as opposed to working with a
single cairo_t for each surface and constantly changing its foreground
color, etc. I don't think that memory here should be an issue, assuming that
a cairo_t is reasonably sized, as other memory demands in my software are
probably huge by comparison. I am wondering if there is any other reason why
my strategy would be inferior from a performance standpoint or if there are
any serious hidden dangers of which I am unaware. From the contrary
perspective, is there anything expensive going on within calls such as
cairo_set_source_rgb() and cairo_set_line_width(), which will be the primary
points of variation within my context objects, or are these trivial
low-overhead functions which just set a couple of structure fields?

On a related note, it appears that there is no way that the same cairo_t
can be used to target different surface objects in the same way that a
single Xlib GC can be used to write to multiple Xlib Pixmaps as long as they
are of the same depth, etc. Is this in fact true, or is there some way
around this? Most of my applications will have multiple off-screen ARGB image
surfaces, all of the same type and depth but with different width and height.
Seems like there ought to be a cairo_set_target(cr, surf) for such cases,
but there does not appear to be such a thing.

(2) Despite being denigrated as a toy API, the cairo_text...() functions
really do seem adequate for my needs. Is this API intended to be stable,
or is it risky to place my faith in it with regard to it remaining a part
of cairo (or not) for the foreseeable future?

(3) It seems like almost all of the cairo_set...(), etc., functions return
void. Is there a standard behavior in place to handle bad arguments to these
calls, or other error conditions? Many of these functions seem unlikely to
fail due to anything other than gross stupidity, e.g., cairo_set_source_rgb(), 
but a call like cairo_select_font_face(cr, "MyNonexistentFont" ...) would
seem a bit different in this regard, with its failure resulting in something 
unpredictable. How can one check for errors from such calls or, if that's 
not possible, what kind of behavior can be expected in the event of failure?

Thanks!

Roger Davis
Univ. of Hawaii