[cairo] Cairo and GdiPlus or two win32 backends

[Jost Boekemeier]

Hi,

do we really need all backends in the cairo core?  I think supporting
different architectures is important because it may reveil certain bugs
or problems in the core implementation or provide other useful input. 
But 4 windows backends it a little bit too much, isn't it?

Anyway I think that these ports/backends should be written so that they
fit into the given framework.


>      but at the moment it apears to rely on GCC auto export facility

I cannot think of any OS where gcc is not available, so I think this
isn't a problem at all.  The situation is different for the java and c++
frontends, though, so I think these languages should be handled with
care.


> (2) Windows Metafiles can be 'rendered' to anything between file, screen
>      and printer. 

Certainly not for metafiles which were generated by cairo.


> (3) Device Independent Bitmap, that is completely pixel based.

I think the only reason why cairo generates pre-rendered pictures
instead of images is that drawing of pictures can be hardware
accelerated when the target device is the screen.
 
 
> There should be nothing special to win32 code except some ugliness ;-)

Yes, but it is always problematic if you don't have the architecture you
claim to support.  I remember someone sent me a patch to run my java
bridge on OSX and since I don't have OSX, I tested on one of the SF
servers. The server rebooted immediately... Fortunately the situation
with OSX is different because the base OS is free software and we were
able to identify a bug in the mach kernel.  But supporting these
architectures requires a lot of work, especially if you don't want to
use the gnu toolchain.


Jost