Xegl lives!

[Jim Gettys]

On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 16:46 -0400, Jon Smirl wrote:
> On 5/24/05, Jim Gettys <Jim.Gettys at hp.com> wrote:
> > The other reality of 20 years experience has been that you *always* have
> > to have a software implementation that goes to pixels.  No graphics
> > system every made has ever done everything all applications want and
> > they always need a way to get their hands on pixels, for those
> > unanticipated needs.  Not to mention not all hardware has 3D
> > capability.....
> > 
> > So much as we'd like to be able to presume that GL is the answer under
> > all circumstances, it isn't, and won't be for years more into the
> > future.
> 
> But the pixel buffer interface doesn't have to have another API. Mesa
> is a fine software OpenGL only implementation. I wish the time being
> spent tuning Cairo for pixel buffers was instead being spent on tuning
> Mesa to draw to those same buffers.
> 

Believe it or not, GL doesn't do everything needed for 2D graphics....
Subpixel text, for one, though Allen Akin was scratching his head to see
if he could figure out how.

Some of Glitz's performance has been by "cheating"; time will tell if it
is as fast when it "gets the right answer".  And time will also tell how
many applications need "the right answer" vs. "the fast answer".  Cairo
lets you choose...  This is by its very nature application dependent.

Not to mention the code once developed, can be lifted and applied to
Mesa; Zack's been developing the code for the first time. Feel free to
lift it and run with it...

				- Jim