[cairo] Re: [Mesa3d-dev] Points in Cairo Glitz paper

[Carl Worth]

On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 10:31:36 -0700 (PDT), Jon Smirl wrote:
> Don't take this as a criticism of Cairo. Cairo is an excellent piece of work.

No criticism taken.

> The existence of the 3D hardware pipeline is just a fact of life that all of us
> have to live with. It is entrenched enough that it won't be significantly
> changing in the foreseeable future.

Sure. But for cairo, the 3D hardware is only one output path.
High-quality print output (PS/PDF) is just as important. That's why the
design starts with the desires of application developers who are
targeting multiple output devices and then works down.

>                                     I'm not suggesting that Cairo follow the
> OpenGL API but that it should take this hardware into account. The fact is we
> only have one accelerated hardware model and Cairo simply needs to decide to
> make full use of it or not. 

I'm not an OpenGL expert, but I've tried to stay aware of the issues so
that cairo remains amenable to an accelerated implementation. That's why
I'm glad to have a discussion like this. I'm quite happy for the hard
work that David and Peter have put in over the past year to give us a
working and activelt maintained OpenGL backend for cairo. I'm optimistic
that that will help keep us honest as we finish up the API design.

-Carl