Re: The future of cairo's X11 backends

Chris Wilson <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lib.cairo
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 11:36:08AM +0200, Uli Schlachter wrote:
> On 29.09.2013 14:02, Chris Wilson wrote:
> >> My plan would be to make cairo-xlib use xcb and XGetXCBConnection() for
> >> everything, dump cairo-xcb and re-implement the cairo-xcb API on top of the code
> >> that is left. This can easily be done incrementally. Basically it is "dump
> >> cairo-xcb and turn cairo-xlib into a new cairo-xcb". I guess this means that the
> >> now-common source files and functions need to be renamed to cairo-x11-*.c and
> >> cairo_x11_*. :-)
> > 
> > That seems reasonable, but realistically what advantages does doing the
> > x11-to-xcb conversion in cairo-xlib give that doing it in libX11 itself
> > misses? I suppose marrying the cairo-device and the Display lock would
> > be improved. We would have to reinvent the XCloseDisplay hooks.
> 
> I am not sure I understand. Do you mean "xlib already talks to xcb for us, why
> would we want to talk to xcb directly"?

Yes, I wondering what the merits are of moving that translation one library
higher.

> The reason for that would be: cairo-xcb exists and (hopefully) doesn't go away.
> Thus cairo has to be able to work with just an xcb_connection_t* instead of a
> Display*. It does so already, but this was done via copying the backend which
> seems wasteful.

Ok, that seems a reasonable argument:

We can support native xcb and native xlib applications using cairo-xcb,
but we cannot support native xcb applications using cairo-xlib.
-Chris

-- 
Chris Wilson, Intel Open Source Technology Centre
-- 
cairo mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.cairographics.org/mailman/listinfo/cairo
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.