On Fri, 27 Oct 2006 15:13:53 -0400, MenTaLguY wrote:
Is Keith now willing to accept an API which doesn't entail a full software implementation of GLSL up-front? That's basically why I finally gave up.
[ See the (belated) continuation of the thread here:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2006-September/007760.html ]
Ah! Well I happened to agree with you on that thread, and my opinion matters much more than Keith's here. He's certainly not about to veto anything we want to do with cairo.
I read his stuff as "you might end up wanting more than this anyway", which I can agree with. But I don't think we need to start with the full-fledged programmable shaders thing before we can provide something as simple as a blur.
Aside from that though, since we had these discussions, I realized that perhaps we should be looking at is the potential for cairo/GEGL integration. It's possible that cairo doesn't really need a full-fledged effects API, just some hooks to allow better interoperation with stuff like GEGL.
That may be too. But GEGL's going to be all-software, right? (At least for now). I agree we don't need to provide an API in cairo to be able to do totally arbitrary effects, but when something like a convolution filter is _so easy_ for almost any hardware to do, it's a shame that cairo isn't exporting any easy way to get at that.
-Carl