On Monday, 22 June 2015 at 12:52:36 UTC, ponce wrote:
On Monday, 22 June 2015 at 08:21:44 UTC, Mike wrote:
Anti-Grain Geometry is not a solid graphic library and it's
not very easy to use. I consider AGG as a “tool to create
other tools”. It means that there's no “Graphics” object or
something like that, instead, AGG consists of a number of
loosely coupled algorithms that can be used together or
separately. All of them have well defined interfaces and
absolute minimum of implicit or explicit dependencies."
It's architecture is what makes it so beautiful. You can
configure your own graphics pipeline simply by passing the
right template arguments. It would be an excellent showcase
for D.
Mike
Thankfully we already have it:
http://blog.thecybershadow.net/2014/03/21/functional-image-processing-in-d/
Data structures separated from algorithms with lazy range-like
computations.
It's just a matter of using it and improving on it.
Another cool library that separates images from algorithms (ala
STL) is Boost GIL (Generic Image Library) [1]. It was developed
internally by Adobe and then they open-sourced it and moved it to
Boost. They used concepts quite extensively in their code
(emulated with C++03/11 features, eww) so leveraging D's features
to the same will be much more natural. I haven't used it, so I am
not sure how featured it is, but key point is that the
abstractions are really solid and generic/algorithmic (not some
inflexible java-style OOP). Like many good designs in D it tries
to use as much as possiple of the types system to propagate
information about the properties of the types (like color spaces,
iterator categories, etc) at compile-time.
I wanted to make a D image library, based on the same ideas, but
so far I haven't had enogh time to do this.
The ae.graphics library design is quite effective (flexible and
easy to use/apply) and is all about getting the job done. On the
other hand Boost GIL is more about systematic abstraction of the
domain area, i.e. more academic. I'm not sure if a more pragmatic
or more theoretical approach is better, but even only porting GIL
to D would be great showcase of D's modeling power.
Here's a video [2] and a design guide [3] that exaplain the
motivation behind GIL:
[1]: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_58_0/libs/gil/doc/index.html
[2]:
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_58_0/libs/gil/doc/html/gildesignguide.html
[3]: http://stlab.adobe.com/gil/presentation/index.htm (video,
requires Flash, couldn't find one that's Flash-free)
