more visiting and less buffering in drawinglayer/

[Armin Le Grand]

Hi Lubos,

On 12/4/21 2:15 PM, Luboš Luňák wrote:
> On Friday 03 of December 2021, Armin Le Grand wrote:
>> In this case it's - as you say - broken and thus an error. So please
>> talk about it, report it
>  How likely would that achieve anything though? It's not like reporting a 
> problem somehow magically fixes it. Even high-priority bugreports with a 
> simple solution like tdf#138068 can apparently linger for quite while, so 
> what's the chance a non-critical problem with a complex fix would do anything 
> else than sit in bugzilla and do nothing?
Yepp, I know that problem, too :-( I would love to be (or have someone)
in a role sponsored (by sth like TDF?) what would allow me/us to do
maintenance :-) Besides filing Tenders (which never get elected, so no
way to continue that DL changes, sigh) I see a missing mechanism for
just doing maintenance in important core regions - optimally by people
which are familiar with it...
>
>> and fix it when it's an error - or motivate others to fix it.
>  Given the above, that's what I normally try to do, but that's not always 
> possible. In the case of the canvas caching, after several attempts at it I 
> managed to fix like 3(?) places that were breaking it, and after I ran into 
> yet another reason why it was irrelevant I just gave up. As for motivating 
> others, I don't see how that'd happen given 'git log canvas cppcanvas' - 
> ironically the largest recent contributor of commits specific to that code is 
> probably me, and the only thing I feel like motivating people to do is to 
> rewrite code using it away from it.

I am still not sure what part of LO you are talking about - if it's
slideshow (replay?), that's mainly THB's original work. There is also a
Tender for this - never got voted, would be also important - to change
that to primitive usage. That would be a precondition to get that
buffering I was talking about into that part - sigh. In the rest of he
office all BM stuff should use BitmapPrimitive by now and should buffer.

Anyways, with the current backends there should be no place (well, never
say never) that does sw-based scaling - we have that DrawTransformed
which can/is pretty much implemented on every backend (?) Maybe hat
broke/is broken somehow? That should be used pretty everywhere and leave
the transformation/scale to the graphic system below - whatever it is.

>
>> I think it's not the most effective way if everyone 
>> implements it's own buffers. This is possible (as we see), but I doubt
>> that it's effective - except that you do not need to cope too much with
>> the existing stuff ;-) It will even eventually conflict potentially in
>> the long run and wastes lots of energy :-( The ype of energy that is the
>> most valuable for the project - developer ressources.
>>
>> Please note that there is nowadays type-template-based buffering of
>> system-dependent data - of *any* kind. That works for win/cairo/X11
>> specific bitmap representations. It also is used for buffering
>> system-dependent PolyPolygon path representations (cairo & win) which
>> are also expensive to re-create at each repaint. I see no hindrance to
>> use the same system for Skia. This is not complicated, just needs a
>> little research/looking (or asking & help) how it is used. It even can
>> have it's own 'decider' if it should be buffered longer or can be
>> dismissed.
>>
>> If there are cases for (software-)scaled/changed bitmaps for paint which
>> are not yet handled - and there are always such, of course - please
>> report them. This system can be used to do this, dependent of
>> attributes/necessities of your choice.
>  Actually that's how I saw it in theory too, and that's where I started,
I did not want to question that, but just ensure it. That's the point
that was important to me! Good to know :-)
>  but 
> then practice went rather differently. As I recall it, it could be summed 
> roughly as:
> - it's not documented (can't help notice the irony of you talking about not 
> wasting developer time when you didn't find 5 minutes to do something about 
> it)

I just did not hear about it until this thread :-( No idea why that
happened...

For documented: I agree we are weak here, but I usually add quite some
comments, and there are examples in he code. But I happily agree that it
would have been better to communicate about it - there should be always
some minutes to be found to answer questions.

> - the usage didn't seem clear from looking at the 3 classes
> - the usage didn't seem clear from looking at how VCL cairo/headless backend 
> uses it (IIRC the main thought I had was that it seemed rather complicated 
> for something as simple as caching)
> - after deciphering some of it the assumptions seemed wrong (only one item of 
> the same type for an object, so no caching of scaling to different sizes; 
> binding the data to the one object, so problematic when copying bitmaps or 
> involving more than one of them)
> - it seemed that trying to save time/code by reusing the code would result in 
> writing more code than would be saved
Less code does not always mean better buffering - some logic is needed
to make it work well.
> - when I tried the cairo backend with whichever bugreport I needed the caching 
> for, it performed poorly
> - so when faced with the decision whether to write a simple cache myself or 
> try to fit a complex undocumented design that probably would work poorly, I 
> indeed decided not to waste developer time
Okay, got it. Just happy that's not what you immediately did. And sorry
that I did somehow not hear about it, would've loved to help here - or
at least o find out together if and how it would have been doable with
existing stuff.
>
>  Even going over this again in hindsight I still think that was the correct 
> and effective decision - AFAICT the Skia backend generally outperforms the 
> Cairo one, and it's not just because of Skia itself. As far as I'm concerned, 
> this is the common OOo problem of something looking nice in theory but 
> struggling with the reality check.
Yeah well - reality is cruel sometimes :-(
>
-- 
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ALG (PGP: EE1C 4B3F E751 D8BC C485 DEC1 3C59 F953 D81C F4A2)