On 9/12/2016 8:06 AM, Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
So, the main reason I wanted to push for this in phobos is because it's an enabler. There is no multimedia in phobos at all. I think that's a shame, and this is a starting point. Any conceivable image based work depends on this as foundation. If pixel format types are phobos-supplied, then D image libraries will naturally be compatible, as opposed to naturally incompatible since every image library will otherwise re-implement their own colour types (and almost always incorrectly). The thing about colours is, they're HARD to get right, but more importantly, most programmers have no idea that it's actually a hard problem and won't tend to go looking for a lib for a colour type (Ie, struct { ubyte r, g, b;}... simple! *cough*). They probably will use it if it's in phobos though for compatibility reasons. Image processing is super easy by contrast.One of my first port-of-calls after this work would be a graph/plot library... I'd use the hell out of that. I constantly want to output data visualisations! It also enables seamless interaction with realtime rendering api's. Ie, if OpenGL/D3D/Vulkan bindings support phobos supplied colour types, then image decoding libraries, and other sources of image data become easy to render without any requirement for adaptation. Rendering libs and image/video data source libs are almost always separate, independent libraries. We need to maximise probability that they are compatible out of the gate. I didn't want to touch 'images' in this work, because there are countless subjective designs to present those API's, but I don't think there's many competing designs for a colour library, so it felt it was the best and most bang-for-buck starting place overall. Also, I think this has very high synergy with ndslice. I think ndslice + color is the foundation for image processing, or at least image data transport.
Thanks for the rationale. I'm glad to see you're planning follow-on libraries! I'd use a graph/plot library myself. Some of the rationale above should go into the documentation for the library.
