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

[Ivan Vučica]

On 26. 4. 2013., at 09:13, David Chisnall <address@hidden> wrote:

> 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
> 

I'll take a look and try to integrate some of that into the proposal. :-)

Regards,

Ivan Vučica
via phone