On Wed, 17 Nov 2004, Johan Forsberg wrote:
I realise by now inkscape is probably a much more complex program than sodipodi but I can't really see why the actual rendering should be slower. Is there a technical explanation for this or is something strange with my system?
The primary difference is that we use a different renderer than Sodipodi's, and ours is slower.
Around 0.37 or 0.38, it became apparent that the renderer we inherited from Sodipodi had profound correctness problems and didn't deal with edge cases well. We tried to address its issues, but found the code to be essentially unmaintainable.
As a stopgap measure, we repurposed the computational geometry library we had been using for union/intersection/etc as a renderer. It's more correct (and slightly less opaque), but heavyweight and slow compared to a specialized rasterizer.
The ultimate plan is to use Cairo for rendering once it matures sufficiently. It's painstakingly correct and should also permit the use of hardware acceleration (via Glitz). We're mainly awaiting a solid Win32 port and further optimization of its software renderer.
-mental