I think its a smart move you started from cairo and then moved to opengl. Its possible afterall to mix cairo with opengl. I think its inevitable . It does not matter that opengl does not specialize on vector graphics, it can do vector graphics and offer massive accelerations in the process.
As soon as I learn opengl my focus will be shifted to porting morphic (at least the base part) and drag Athens in the process. So tell your friend that opengl support is definetly coming ;) . Just dont tell him "soon" :D I am not going to be rewriting Cairo into smalltalk of course, or doing any kind of major coding / rewrite , just using the existing methods Cairo has for communicating with opengl. From the little I know it creates a quad polygon in opengl ,apply a texture on it and Cairo is used to draw the texture. One of things people who are not familiar with graphics is general are not aware of is the massive acceleration a GPU can give, that in some cases can outperform CPUs by 100 times. But thats not the mind blowing stuff, the mind blowing stuff is that this acceleration is not even graphics specific. CUDA technology is already used in physics, maths and other extremely demanding computing tasks. Pharo can tap on this massive power (eg . language parsers ) that is even available even on 100 euros nvidia cards and soon will be available for every pc and mac out there for peanuts. Probably its a matter of time before penetrate the mobile market too. We coders in blender (3d app) have already seen blender's new render engine offer the unthinkable , real time full renders with minor delays using the CUDA technology through the new render engine called "cycles". The previous render engine would take at least minutes to offer a same quality render, so its a massive move forward. So my conclusion is that eveything has its place . Cairo + Opengl + CUDA , makes a trio of ustopable benefits that pharo cannot afford to ignore in any case. I will try to offer my little part in this process, it wont be easy I know , it could take years, but it will certainly be a lot of fun . -- View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-dev-Cairo-vs-openGL-tp4692947p4692975.html Sent from the Pharo Smalltalk Developers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
