[Mesa-dev] New "state tracker": Pylladium

[Keith Whitwell]

On Sun, 2010-05-02 at 11:04 -0700, José Fonseca wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-05-02 at 09:34 -0700, Corbin Simpson wrote:
> > So I got bored a few days ago and broke ground on a little bit of code
> > I've had in mind for a while. This is a new state tracker, Pylladium,
> > that acts to expose the core Gallium objects of a driver in a clean,
> > Pythonic fashion, without being overly low-level or abstracted away.
> > 
> > So why make another tracker when there's already a great one maintained by Jose?
> > 
> > 1) SWIG. The current tracker must be compiled against a pipe driver
> > library, and can't dynamically switch between drivers. Additionally,
> > it can't be run on any Python besides CPython, which is mostly a
> > personal annoyance but something some people honestly have to work
> > with.
> 
> This was true at start, but actually this is not strictly true anymore
> -- it does not need to be compiled against a pipe driver besides
> softpipe/llvmpipe. It uses custom GLX/WGL extensions to use the driver
> in system's DLL, but I never got around to implement the GLX extesion on
> Linux. (^_^;)

And actually it's very easy to break the existing python state tracker
away from softpipe/llvmpipe and use the 'targets' mechanism to construct
versions of it above arbitrary gallium drivers.

Given the existing abstraction over dri drivers, there could be a single
target that layers the python state tracker above any of the DRI
drivers.

Keith