[Cairo] Software rendering

[David Forster]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 09:43:41AM -0400, Carl Worth wrote:
> show_page is certainly one one truly unique capability. Are there many
> others that people can think of?

I'm curious that if you don't have a showpage operator, then how are
you going to support client side rendering?  That is, Cairo has no
idea when to upload all it's changes so it's going to have to do it
for each operation.  That seems overly expensive.  With a showpage,
Cairo could upload everything in one batch.

Not to mention double-buffering is useful enough for normal RENDER
rendering, OpenGL, GIF, MNG[*], PDF, and PS.

If double-buffering isn't enabled, or it makes no sense for a
particular backend, it's harmless enough to make showpage and newpage
no-ops.

IMHO,
-Dave

[*] I don't know much about MNG.  I assume it can do a `pixmap
flip-book' like GIF, at the very least.