[cairo] Proposal: cairo_save_state/cairo_restore_state

[Alexander Larsson]

On Mon, 2006-01-23 at 23:49 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

> Before you get too much into implementation, can I request a
> feature?  Make it copy-on-write?  All you need to do is to add a
> flag to cairo_state_t stating if it's a saved state.  Then, any
> function modifying a cairo_state_t will first check if it's a
> saved state, if it is, it will duplicate it first and update the
> cario_t.  It probably needs a bit of refactoring since you may
> have not the cairo_t around when modifying cairo_state_t, but
> this feature makes creating a cairo_t, configuring it (using
> saved states) and using it extremely fast.  That was the
> intention of the bug reporter at least...

Copy on write is generally cool, but it can have threadsafeness issues.
I.E. If you want it threadsafe you take a performance hit in the
locking. If you don't make it threadsafe then the rules to use state
objects in a multithreaded app gets really complicated, as its hard to
know which objects are the same.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
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