On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 9:29 AM, Greg Ercolano <[email protected]> wrote: > On 03/11/12 14:54, Duncan Gibson wrote: >> OP described 2 separate issues: >> 1. slow performance of offscreen overlays, and >> 2. improving the look/performance of widgets using Cairo >> >>> I agree that improving the widget's look is a good idea, >>> and perhaps it should start with making a new set of parallel >>> widgets that can easily be used or enabled in parallel with >>> our current releases. >> >> I would hesitate to add a whole slew of parallel widgets as such, where >> you would have the original Fl_* widgets and equivalent Fl_Cairo_* ones. >> >> IMHO it would be better to keep the Fl_* names as adaptors that either >> used conditional compilation to use the original or cairo (or whatever) >> internals, or used some environment variable to choose at run-time. >> >> Then people would have the same interface to FLTK and wouldn't have to >> change their code to use the Cairo (or whatever) alternatives. > > My thinking was development of these parallel widgets > could go in directions that don't need to precisely follow > our existing API, and one could still choose between them. > (ie. a straight FLTK interface, but only cairo styled buttons) > > This would allow development to be slow, yet allow people to add > nicer widgets to their existing applications. >
Just to keep this discussion sane: the only thing that widgets containing only straight lines have to benefit from Cario is alpha blending. And any changes to style would be better made in the boxtypes... It's more important that fl_line, arc, curve, polygon and friends use Cairo so that diagonal lines and curves don't show aliasing. Alpha blending is not terribly important to me, even though most other DAWs may use it extensively, it's fairly easy to fake when you have solid background layers. Of course, there are many other applications for which alpha blending is an absolute necessity. I challenge someone to make a realistic comparision between GTK's rendering path on X11 and FLTK's. You might be surprised how much faster GTK is now that it uses Cairo, even though it's still as bloated as ever... _______________________________________________ fltk-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.easysw.com/mailman/listinfo/fltk-dev
