Re: OpenGL, GtkGlArea, GtkGLExt

[Mikael Hallendal <micke imendio com>]

4 mar 2008 kl. 19.14 skrev Behdad Esfahbod:

Hi,

> On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 17:04 +0000, Carlos Pereira wrote:
>
> > I have red a few times that thread, that Owen started five years ago,
> > and apparently there is agreement in the essentials:
> >
> > 1) remove all the fat from Gtkglext, namely the wrapper functions
> > discussed in that thread, make it a small library that cares only for
> > opengl integration, that works in the X window system but also in
> > Windows and Mac OS X, exactly as Gtk.
>
> Correct.
>
> > 2) change the name, for example to Gtkglarea 2.0*, the legitimate
> > sucessor to Gtkglarea 1 (the last version of Gtkglarea that I  
> > downloaded
> > last week is 1.99 and still comes with gtk_signal_connect and other  
> > Gtk
> > 1.2* functions deprecated long ago)
>
> No, gtkglarea is dead.  We don't want a new widget.  We want being  
> able
> to render to widgets using OpenGL as an alternative to using cairo.
> That is, the GtkGlExt approach.

This shouldn't be too much work as most of the code already is there.

> > 3) make it an official (but optional) Gtk library, downloadble from
> > www.gtk.org.
>
> No.  Push it into the Gtk+ tarball, probably as a new .so.  Like gdk,
> gdk-pixbuf, and gtk are different .so's.

Definitely agree.

> > I believe this would make Gtk more appealing, particularly for
> > scientific/engineering/architecture applications.
> > Carlos
>
> Indeed.

Not to mention new kind of user experiences for regular desktop  
applications (read Mac OS X) or mobile applications in the spirit of  
iphone. Much of it can be done without GL though, but some things  
definitely need hardware acceleration and 3D awareness.

Cheers,
  Mikael Hallendal

--
Imendio AB, http://www.imendio.com