[cairo] Re: Making Cairo friendlier for embedded use

[Damian Dixon]

I've also been lurking on the list.

I do embedded development on quite low powered ARM and PowerPC systems
so floating point can quickly become an issue.

We only use GTK+ for raster drawing rather then anything else so I am
not concerned too much with GTK+ using floating point arithmetic (via
Cario).

Currently Cario does not give us the performance we require, though I
continue to lurk as the glitz backend is of interest to us as we
currently mix X11/Win32 and OpenGL/DirectX and Cario would potentially
allow us to reduce the complexity.

The strategy we have taken in our vector rendering engine is to use
integer's upto the point we detect that we need to drop to
float/double's. Hopefully a similar strategy will be adopted when people
look at performance in Cario.

Regards
Damian

>On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 16:25 -0500, Sean Kelley wrote:
>> I was wondering if anyone has been considering the long-term impact
of
>> the floating point intensive Cairo on embedded products wishing to
>> make use of Gtk+?  In general, resource limited processors like ARM
>> lack an fpu.  Recent improvements such as softfloat in gcc have
>> helped.  But just curious if there are other developers on this list
>> who have a long term interest in staying in step with Gtk+
>> improvements beyond 2.6.  Currently I am doing an embedded design
>> based on Gtk+ 2.6.10.  I just was curious if there are other embedded
>> developers on this list.
>
>I lurk on this list keeping half an eye on cairo development.
>
>We use GTK+ (2.4.x right now) in an embedded product and hope to be
able
>to continue to use GTK+ on that platform, as well as cairo in its own
>right. Our "embedded" platform (a Geode GX2) is really very powerful,
so
>fpu support isn't itself a problem, but we have a general interest in
>cairo and GTK+ staying slim and fast so that our products are
>responsive.
>
>kind regards,
>
>Seb James
>

--
Damian Dixon, BSc(Hons), BSc(Hons), FRGS.
TENET Defence Ltd., North Heath Lane, Horsham, West Sussex, RH12
5UX,United Kingdom
Tel: +44 1403 273173  Fax: +44 1403 273123
Email: damian.dixon at tenet.co.uk
http://www.tenet.co.uk, http://www.tenetdefence.com
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