[cairo] Speed of Cairo on Win32

[Carl Worth]

On Fri, 07 May 2004 18:28:28 +0200, =?ISO-8859-2?Q?Mateusz_=A3oskot?= wrote:
> > WGL (Windows GL layer) support is planned for the Glitz backend of
> > cairo. This means that in the future cairo should be potentially very
> > fast on decent 3D graphics hardware using OpenGL output.=20
> 
> I need something for 2D drawing only.
> Cairo seems to be solution I'm looking for, as
> better equivalent to Win32 GDI.

Yes, cairo is a 2D API. Peter just said that in the future, the glitz
library should be able to take advantage of the 3D graphics hardware to
make cairo's 2D graphics fast.

In the meantime, all we have in cairo for non-X, non-OpenGL drawing is
an unoptimized software implementation. There's not yet support within
cairo to draw directly to a native win32 window. (A couple of people
have mentioned that they have gotten this to work with manual copies,
but the code hasn't been pushed into cairo CVS yet).

Some people have even suggested making the win32 backend for cairo sit
on top of GDI.

> So, I'm interested in the performance differences, if there are any,
> between GDI and Cairo.

With the current all-software implementation of cairo on win32, GDI
would have to be pretty pathetic if it were slower.

Any help in improving the current situation would of course be greatly
appreciated. Obviously, Peter and David are already working on the
glitz/WGL approach.

-Carl