[cairo] Porting GTK+ to use Cairo

Jamey Sharp jamey at minilop.net
Sun Jun 6 14:34:18 PDT 2004


On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 10:56:39AM +0200, Jost Boekemeier wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 17:14, Carl Worth wrote:
> 
> > One thing that is nice about the cairo architecture is that we have the
> > flexibility to experiment with interesting combinations of client- and
> > server-side rendering.
> 
> Yeah -- I think I can send a patch against GDK at the end of this month,
> maybe earlier.
> 
> What I currently have is an ugly hack, but it already demonstrates that
> cairo/gtk applications will be more responsive because we get rid of all
> these reconfigure messages to modify X-server state, some of them were
> even serialized. 

Have you looked at porting Gdk to XCB [1]? If Gdk's performance is
limited by round-trip latency, the XCB latency hiding mechanism should
help.

When you use the modular freedesktop.org version of Xlib configured
--with-xcb, you can convert one statement at a time from Xlib to XCB, so
you can take advantage of latency hiding (or any of XCB's other good
properties) where it matters and leave the rest of the code alone.

Admittedly, XCB and the XCB-based Xlib are currently both experimental
code that few people have tested. I'll happily help anyone who has
trouble with this software, of course. (You might have to wait for me to
finish my final exams this week though.)

Since we're on the Cairo list here, I'll point out that I contributed an
XCB backend to Cairo several months ago, but I guess nobody has tried it
because nobody has sent me e-mail saying that text rendering doesn't
work. :-) My suspicion is that I don't understand something about cairo
or libpixman, so I've been hoping someone would tell me what I did
wrong.

[1] http://freedesktop.org/Software/xcb
-- 
Jamey Sharp <jamey at minilop.net> - http://minilop.net/
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