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August 14, 2005
Cairo Graphics and Quartz
So it seems that Mozilla.org is serious about using Cairo as its graphics library. That being the case, I figured I should probably start on a Quartz backend for Cairo. I didn't have too much time today, but in an hour or so I was able to read some docs, compile the Cairo libraries, and build a Cocoa test app. My test app is just a window that Cairo can draw into so I can test things easily. I only got far enough to get Cairo drawing shapes and whatnot into my test app, but it was still a gratifying feeling to see Cairo actually draw something for the first time on my system. What it draws now is not done through a proper Quartz backend, but I hope to fix that.
I'm really looking forward to doing this because I have never written much in the way of graphics code. It should be an awesome learning experience. I hope Pav and Vlad don't get annoyed with my wandering over to ask them lots of questions...
This is the beginning of the end for Quickdraw in Mozilla.org products. Thank God.
Posted by josh at August 14, 2005 2:57 AM
Comments
With QuickDraw gone, the speed boosts in Tiger are going to be something to write home about! Did you see the Quartz/QuickDraw comparisons per OSX version in the ArsTechnica review? Quite staggering.
Posted by: Kroc Camen at August 14, 2005 8:28 AM
Kroc Camen, do you have a link for that article?
Posted by: James at August 14, 2005 10:15 AM
The the article mentionned is http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/14.
The speed improvements for Tiger are indeed dramatic however, users still on pather will take a speed hit!
ALso some coding practices need to be met, Form the article
"This is why an application that discards all of its graphics data references as soon as it's done with them may actually get slightly slower when running under Quartz 2D Extreme."
Posted by: Pat at August 14, 2005 11:12 AM
There already is a Quartz backend in cairo, I hope you're building on that!
Posted by: Robert O'Callahan at August 14, 2005 3:29 PM
BTW tor has done some work on it. You might want to touch base with him.
Posted by: Robert O'Callahan at August 14, 2005 3:30 PM
Roc: The backend in Cairo right now basically just dumps a software-rendered bitmap down the quartz pipeline. It isn't much of a backend, it is only enough to get it to work.
Posted by: Josh Aas at August 14, 2005 5:34 PM
Well, QuickDraw is not gone yet, perhaps it won't be gone in Leopard either, although it has been deprecated.
The speed boosts mentioned in the ars technica article are also partially misleading, sure the numbers are correct but they are comparing just line drawing and frankly give no real information about the test setup.
Sure Quartz is again faster than in previous revision the real gains are not as big as in line drawing benchmark. One should also note that the Quartz 2D Extreme is not enabled by default, at least not yet. Also the possible speed gains using it require a Bad Ass (tm) gfx-chip.
But anyway, this is great news. Cairo is the way to go and having a good Quartz backend for it would be cool. Go for it!
Posted by: Jonathan at August 14, 2005 7:48 PM
I have been interested very much in the Cairo :) and I am very satisfied.
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