Hi Micah,

many thanks for your very informative reply.

> I'm evaluating which GUI to port to a non-unixstyle multitasking OS with
> limited posix lib support. Although the CPU performance is more like
> "embedded", the use is a highresolution desktop rather than a small display.

If you're using too big of a display on a small CPU, things will be slow
without hardware acceleration. If there's any acceleration hardware, picogui
should be able to take advantage of it with the right driver.
The graphics hardware is simple highcolor, linear memory mapped, non-accelerated,
but has about 30 MBytes/sec bandwidth. It actually can run Linux+X at usable speed,
so it should be ideal for PicoGUI+framebuffer with the native small OS.

> Does this mean overlapping PicoGUI windows are only supported via X, not on
> bare framebuffer without X?

For now yes, but this is planned to change. Part of this is the App Manager's
responsibility, and part of it is in the video driver and rendering engine.

Currently PicoGUI's built-in rendering engine doesn't support overlapping
correctly. However, there is a 'rootless' mode where all top-level windows
are managed by an external system. This lets picogui do overlapping in X.
On the framebuffer, you could do the same thing using DirectFB. PicoGUI has
no DirectFB driver yet, but it wouldn't be much work to write one.

There are plans to rewrite PicoGUI's rendering engine using a pretty nifty
new algorithm that would make all drawing more efficient, and support
full overlapping. Once this is done it would be easy to remove DirectFB if
desired.
I would like to avoid DirectFB, this hardware wouldn't benefit from
the abstraction of graphics accelerators anyway.

Frankly spoken, my problem is the decision between Nano-X (with existing
acceptable window manager, but "old-fashioned" and more client resource usage)
and PicoGUI (nice architecture, but very young and yet no suitable window
manager.)

Since FLTK is unusable on my system (lack of C++ compiler for native OS),
and TinyWidgets is no more developed, I tend toward PicoGUI, because it
has promising serverside widgets and themes.
But as things look, I would have to wait for your new rendering engine...

Can you give me a rough idea how far in the future I can hope for full
overlapping windows support? Are we likely talking weeks, months, or years?

Thanks,
Peter




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