Re: GTK+ scene graph

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;

On 18 August 2014 19:09, Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 1:55 PM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> [ .. ]
>
> realistically, by comparison with other platforms and with many home-grown
> GUI toolkits, there's really only one sane design for any toolkit in 2014:
>
>    * recursively nested objects with a common "draw" virtual method that
> renders onto a surface (*) as the only way pixels get drawn
>    * access to a GL surface when and if necessary
>    * packing and layout orthogonal to drawing from the application code
> perspective
>
> anything that moves GTK closer to this is good. anything that moves it
> further away or impedes motion towards it is bad.
>
> (*) presumably cairo for 2D and GL for 3D but smart people can disagree
> about this.

if we ignore the GL side, then good job: GTK+ 3.12 is already pretty
much that. except, you know:

 * the API being weird
 * the lack of a box model for CSS to draw on
 * the lack of support for 3D transforms and animations
 * the lack of an animation API capable of implementing dynamic layout
management policies

and a bunch of other smaller details.

in any case, the end goal is to make GTK+ 4.0 a better API for writing
dynamic and compelling applications for a variety of form factors.
maybe provide enough building blocks for people to write their own
smaller canvases/toy toolkits on top, in order to satisfy ad hoc
requirements.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
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