[cairo] Re: drawlist type functionality?

[Pete Shinners]

Jost Boekemeier <jost2345 <at> yahoo.de> writes:
> I am sorry, but I don't understand this at all.

Prerendering shapes to images is a poor substitute for drawlist functionality.
The advantage of a drawlist or a cached path object it that the draw commands
can be reused in entirely different contexts.

Drawing commands inherit any of the line width, style, colors, fills, patterns,
transforms, etc from the context. Image buffers are also rasterized at a
specific scale and orientation. The quality of render would quickly degradeif
prerendered image buffers were used.

Drawlists in OpenGL are a perfect solution to optimizing renders in high level
languages. As a bonus, they are a good optimization for low level languages too.

Keeping an external path object is more related to using vertex buffers in
opengl. To me this seems like a good middle ground. It offers several of the
benefits but doesn't come with the complexity of drawlists.