Re: OpenGL, GtkGlArea, GtkGLExt

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

On Tue, 2008-03-04 at 17:04 +0000, Carlos Pereira wrote:

> Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> > 3 mar 2008 kl. 22.48 skrev Carlos Pereira:
> >
> > Hi Carlos,
> >
> > GtkGLext seems to be the most popular GL Area to use these days. You 
> > might also want to look at Clutter [1] or Pigment [2] which are 
> > canvases offering some higher level abstractions for 2D/3D usages. It 
> > depends a bit on what you need, if you just want an area for pure GL 
> > I'd go with GtkGLext.
> >
> > Regarding future inclusion of GL in GTK+ there is an open bug about it 
> > in the Bugzilla [3], I started looking into it a while back but didn't 
> > have time to get anything off my hard drive. There are some open 
> > issues in that you can read about in the bug tracker.
> Thanks Michael,
>
> 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.


> 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.

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

Indeed.

-- 
behdad
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