On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 9:12 AM, Dmitry wrote:
Hello MenTaLguY!
I would like to know why multi-threading haven't been realized in Inkscape for so long time, many users wrote that they would like to have full power of theit multi-core processors.
Dear Dmitry :)
In free and open source software project, much like almost everywhere else, things are done when there is someone to do them.
Proper implementation of multithreading is not like writing Yet Another Text Editor :) One really needs particular programming skills for that.
The aforementioned leveraging of computations to GPU is often considered as a "silver bullet" of some sort which it really isn't. I do believe that a lot of optimizations could be done without either GPU or multithreading (look at Xara Xtreme, e.g.). However if you find a way to implement multithreading so that things are really faster, I dare say nobody's going to complain :)
In my opinion the best solution these days is to use something like OpenCL so that parallel computation could be leveraged to both CPUs, GPUs and network computers. While being new, this framework really is the most promising technology today. Supported by open drivers, too.
I'm starting doing this work and I want to know what are the difficulties, is it real to complete in 2.5 months working 8 hours per day?
Are you referring to GSoC by the way?
Alexandre