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Re: [GSoC Mentors Announce] Google Summer of Code 2013


From: David Chisnall
Subject: Re: [GSoC Mentors Announce] Google Summer of Code 2013
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:13:36 +0100

On 26 Apr 2013, at 07:41, "Lundberg, Johannes" <address@hidden> wrote:

> While we're discussing lower level graphics API I would like to ask one more 
> thing.
> 
> What would it take to run GNUstep on DirectFB instead of X? Is this possible 
> at this time?

Someone did create a DirectFB back end, but it was never pushed upstream.  I'm 
not sure it's such an interesting target anymore, because with GLES hardware 
becoming ubiquitous it's more important to be able to offload rendering to the 
GPU (for power efficiency, and also to do compositing of complex UIs at a 
reasonable speed).  

Note that there are three parts to a back end:

- The rendering part, which is responsible for managing graphics contexts and 
putting pixels on the screen (or not - it would be nice to have a stub back end 
for headless applications that wanted to use AppKit things for PDF rendering 
and so on)

- The input handling part, which is responsible for mapping host system input 
events to NSEvents for the correct target.

- The host environment integration, which includes things like exposing the 
same fonts as other applications and ensuring that copy-and-paste / 
drag-and-drop work with non-GNUstep applications.

These are not entirely separated in the back end.  It would be nice for Ivan's 
GSoC project to disentangle them a bit more so that each nominal back end is 
formed by cleanly composing classes for each of these things.  For example, 
DirectFB will want to supply its own event handling, but will reuse the font 
management via FreeType and will reuse the drawing from Cairo / Opal, but will 
provide its own graphics context setup code.  

David

-- Sent from my Cray X1




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