Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:
This looks indeed interesting, however, wouldn't it be best to address the slow redraw issue? Or is it a Cairo/GTK problem rather than internal Inkscape's? (I would assume it is related to Cairo/GTK).
No, this is Inkscape's internal renderer.
I recently saw a comparative chart about various vector engines (alas it is biased) at the Xara project's website, an it seems that Cairo is still a tad too slow (compared even to Microsoft's GDI), and Xara's engine seems to be the fastest (again, this comparative is biased). You can see comparatives here: www.xaraxtreme.org (plus the Open Source announcement), It would be interesting to have Cairo perform as fast.
It would be interesting to see a couple things with that performance comparison. First, a comparison made with the most current stable Cairo. Second, a comparison made of Cairo w/ the Glitz back-end. From what I've heard, the performance of Cairo w/ Glitz is approaching the speed of Xara, however, that is just hearsay until I see it for myself. ;)
-Josh