gnustep-dev
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Could GNUStep allow for iPhone porting to Android?


From: David Chisnall
Subject: Re: Could GNUStep allow for iPhone porting to Android?
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:07:05 +0100

On 28 Sep 2011, at 20:52, Ivan Vučica wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 16:32, David Chisnall <address@hidden> wrote:
>> We have a CoreGraphics implementation written on top of Cairo (Opal).  This 
>> would make sense for implementing UIKit, since custom views in UIKit will 
>> all use CoreGraphics.
>> 
>> Cairo supports rendering to an OpenGL texture.  Banlu did some work to 
>> render AppKit views to textures - this sort of thing would be a good base 
>> for the CoreAnimation stuff.
>> 
> Sounds like something I *really* need to dig into.

I'm not sure what the exact status of Opal is, but it was making some 
nice-looking demos (things like gradients and shadows working nicely for 
example) - maybe Eric can give an update.  The thing that's really needed is 
integration with the back end.

We discussed this a bit at FOSDEM, and the basic idea (I think) was that there 
would be a slight restructuring of the back end so that Opal would always do 
the drawing and the window management part would just be responsible for 
providing Cairo drawing contexts.  If you want to use a system without native 
Cairo support, you could just render to an image surface and then draw using 
something else.

Then FOSDEM ended, and no one had the time to implement any of this...

>>  > Targeting SDL and GL or SDL and Cairo might make things more universally 
>> portable.
>> >
>> > Any thoughts?
>> 
>> OpenGL doesn't make sense for 2D drawing - it lacks things like antialiased 
>> beziers, for example, which are the fundamental drawing primitive of all 
>> Cocoa stuff.  This needs to be layered on at a higher level, which is what 
>> Cairo does.
>> 
>> SDL makes some sense.  Gregory and I discussed this a while ago.  It's on 
>> the list of 'things that would be good if someone had time to work on them'. 
>>  I think Android has an SDL implementation, so if we could use SDL for 
>> events and window management, Cairo for drawing layers and OpenGL for 
>> compositing layers, then this would give us a back end that was fairly 
>> universally portable.
>> 
> That sounds awesome.

Unfortunately, sounding awesome is as far as it's got.  If you're looking for a 
project...

David

-- Send from my Jacquard Loom




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]