I wish make the point we are at the moment, seen the number of newcomers. We have 2 main platforms: Windows and Linux, there is also a third platform at the moment that is OSX. The accelerated APIs on this platforms are provided by:
Linux: GTK/CairoLib Windows: GDI+ / Direct2D OSX: Quartz 2D (CoreGraphics) New APIs, wrapped in wxGraphicsContext, to perform at their maximum should transfer draw commands in the largest batch as possible. Instead the current Kicad code born with the old generation APIs draws the screen primitive by primitive. Dick (if i recall well) has already done a brunch of job to support wxGraphicsContext but the showstopper in this case was the Windows Platform using GDI+ (being slower than the old stlyle API). And Torsen has started its GAL job for this reason.. Now we have also another problem GDI+ HW acceleration (on the cards supporting it) is unsupported on Windows 7 or Vista (updated) that has issued a new standard Direct2D ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd370990%28v=VS.85%29.aspx ). wxWidgets supports multiple wxGraphicsContexts for each platforms and lets the user choose which wants to use. If some Windows User/Developer is not happy about Kicad performance could make the wxGraphicsContext interface work on Direct2D here the GDI+ implementation http://svn.wxwidgets.org/viewvc/wx/wxWidgets/trunk/src/msw/graphics.cpp?view=markup US Kicad developers we will more than happy to change deeply the drawing code to perform much better, than now and i think that also Torsen could be happy to have some working example to expand its GAL. -- Marco
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