Re: GtkCanvas requirements?

[Cody Russell <bratsche gnome org>]

On Thu, 2007-04-19 at 18:51 +0200, Carlos Garnacho wrote:
> There have been several discussions about getting a canvas into GTK+,
> being the last one in the GTK+ meeting at Fosdem [2], where one of the
> conclusions was that we needed to gather the candidates on one side
> and
> the desired feature set for a GtkCanvas on another.
> - Integrate tightly GTK+ and the canvas, even making GtkWidgets
> specialized canvas elements drawn with a certain layout in a canvas,
> see
> Havoc's proposal [3]
>         
> Thoughts? Opinions? 

This is awesome.  I want to propose another thing, which I think is
especially worth considering if we move in the direction of implementing
widgets and layouts using the canvas:

I'd like the canvas system to be generalized enough that we can have
multiple implementations of it, in the same way that GDK allows us to
port to Win32 or MacOSX.  In particular, I think we could have an
implementation that is much like what most of the canvases are doing
today where everything is software rendered.. but I also think we could
do an OpenGL backend, an OpenGL|ES backend, and possibly a Direct3d
backend if there were a reason to do one.

I've been putting some thought into the idea of a GPU-based GTK, and
when Havoc first mentioned going the route of having a canvas-based
widget system I became instantly interested in that because I thought it
was the perfect opportunity to go the GPU route.

/ Cody