Re: Qt for GNOME?

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 17:34 +0200, Sascha Peilicke wrote:
> Le Wednesday, 16. July 2008 17:04:43, vous avez écrit :
> > I also can't help thinking that, why not put a Qt API on top of GNOME
> > Platform?
> I think you're meaning the other way around, Gnome on top of Qt, thats the 
> topic.

No, I exactly meant what I said.

> > Believe it or not, Qt is a more polished and integrated toolkit on the
> > surface, but we have better and more robust code in the inside.  I say
> > that from my experience from Pango, having worked with Qt hackers to
> > merge the text shaping engine of Qt and Pango into HarfBuzz.  We also
> > have things like cairo, which is becoming the standard drawing API on
> > freedesktop, is designed with API usability in mind from the beginning,
> > and is simply too cool to give away.
> 
> I'm not into all the details relating pango and cairo implementation but at 
> least the latter has a weakness, it has only a double-precision rendering 
> path, no single-precision and no int-based, which is bad for embedded devices 
> which have limited capabilities (no floating point unit, ...).

That's by design: the current API is more usable than three versions of
each function.

We are yet to see a report showing that the double precision API is a
measurable slowdown for any real use case.  And we have people using
cairo and profiling it on embedded devices.  If you have such results,
please share it with us.


Cheers,

-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
        -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759