[Pixman] Pixman on iOS

[Andrea Canciani]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 8:09 PM, cu <cairouser at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm actually more worried that if this build for iPhone ends up being
>>> a one shot experiment without any maintainer to keep it alive, then it
>>> is going to bitrot soon. IMHO adding support for more marginal
>>> platforms (in cairo/pixman context) is not something that is clearly
>>> beneficial. More like it will attract the users who can't solve their
>>> problems themselves but complaining about bugs and breakages.
>>>
>>
>>
> That might be me :) That said, I think iOS is not a marginal platform -
> perhaps differently abled :) That it is not a major target for cairo is
> a matter of time and a bit of chicken & egg issue. It would be if there
> was support for it.

Cairo should already provide the needed support for iOS in the
Quartz backend. If that is the main backend used by the application,
Pixman should already be quite usable without NEON optimization,
as it will only be used for fallbacks. Of course it would be nice to get
NEON fast paths, if they can actually be used on that architecture.

>
> As for users that can't solve their own problems - that describes
> majority of users of any library, pixman not being any different.
>
> I'll give your pre-compiled optimized code a try. I wonder if there is a
> way to make some sort of a step-by-step writeup of what's needed to make
> code like that, so that someone with access to both Linux and iOS/MacOS
> could repeat these steps.

An example/model of such a guide could be:
http://www.cairographics.org/end_to_end_build_for_mac_os_x/

It gives you the whole sequence of commands needed to compile
the library (in the boxes) and explains what's happening and why.

Andrea