Re: Gtk && Xara

[John Cupitt <jcupitt gmail com>]

On 10/17/05, Michael Torrie <torriem chem byu edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 13:59 -0700, Colossus wrote:
> > Tomaz Canabrava wrote:
> > > Since the Cairo rendering engine is *SLOW* and the Xara Extreme is being
> > > ported to linux, with the full API,
> > > i think that´s a good idia to port the Gtk engine to use Xara´s System since
> >
> > Who told you Cairo is slow in comparison to Xara Extreme ?
> > Xara Extreme is not GPL so no port is possible.
>
> I don't know anything about Xara Extreme, but they are indeed planning
> to license it under the GPL:
>
> http://www.xaraxtreme.org/news/11-10-05.html
>
> I'm sure that Cairo will benefit from some of their algorithms and ideas
> for sure.  Perhaps Xara would even be best ported to run on top of
> Cairo, since it is illustration software.

That's interesting. They have some simple speed charts here:

  http://www.xaraxtreme.org/about/

which seems to show xara's software renderer is 5 - 10x faster than
cairo's. Though it's not clear what cairo backend or platform they did
the timings on. I guess windows?