Salutations!
My name is Dennis Lin, and (until Friday) I'm an intern at Intel. As you may have heard, Intel has released a GPL version of Thread Building Blocks (http://osstbb.intel.com/). In an attempt to gain greater adoption, they have asked me to look into using it to thread existing open-source applications.
I've played with the Inkscape source for the last couple of weeks, and I should have some patches soon. I'll try to put out a patch later today to avoid redrawing the entire screen when scrolling diagonally. (This should be independent of scrolling). Where do you prefer your patches?
I also have some questions as to how I should proceed. I have found (the hard way) that nr-arena-shape is very *not* threadsafe. However, the Cairo version seems to be a lot better. Is the intent to move everything to Cario in the near future? (I probably don't have enough time remaining to do the conversion, but I might be able to get started, and I can continue on my "free time" after school starts again.) More generally, I have noticed that the sp-canvas and nr-arena-item seem to be scheduled for a rewrite. I have been trying to keep my changes relatively unintrusive, but I was wondering what direction I should be trying to nudge things.
Finally, I would like to gauge the interest in this work. What are your sentiments on multithreading in general, and in using TBB to do in particular?
Thank you for your time,
Dennis Lin