On 12 Mar 2012, at 17:28, J. Liles wrote:

> 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.


Yup - this is what the abstraction of the rendering layer is supposed to 
provide; I believe it is now in a state where, if there was someone able to put 
the time in, it could be leveraged to use Cairo (or maybe EGL...) to do all the 
low-level rendering, at which point (as int he Cocoa/Quartz case) everybody 
magically gets anti-alised rendering "for free"...

I think this would be a great thing to do, but I can't provide to the effort 
myself... commitments... Anyone?

> 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.

It would be nice to have some better alpha-blending support in X11, if only for 
parity with OSX... but it is not trivial to "drop in" to the base system, and 
ensuring it works across the strange variety of X-servers we see in the wild is 
"tricky" (or apparently, impossible; c.f. the double buffering issues you 
report!)


> 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...

It would indeed be very interesting. My tests, such as they are, do suggest 
Cairo is still slower, but that's hardly definitive; do you have any numbers 
that show it's not the case?




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