Re: GtkGLExt (was Re: Gtk 3.0)

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 20:51 +0000, Carlos Pereira wrote:
> Hi Emmanuele,
> > I'm really not working on it - mainly for three reasons: 1) if you want to
> > use GL, GtkGlExt is "good enough" and integrating it into gtk+ it's not a
> > good idea;
> 1) If you think GtkGlExt should not be integrated with GTK+ that's fine 
> for me.
>
> 2) GtkGlExt is good enough for GTK-2.0, I never had a single problem with GTKGLExt.
>
> 3) However GtkGlExt is not GTK-3.0 ready, because it cannot be compiled with SEAL_ENABLE and 
> SINGLE_INCLUDES...

I guess that you'll have to patch GtkGLExt, and submit patches for
integration upstream.

> 4) Scientific/engineering applications often use OpenGL, which is a well established, well documented, 
> industry-standard with a large, vibrant community, as these foruns clearly show:
>
> http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/

I never said that raw OperGL is not used, or not useful; I just contend
that being able to  drop into GL directly is a niche usage - and it's
not getting any more mainstream.

people flee from OpenGL in disgust, and it's just OpenGL 3.x that's
making some progress towards fixing the insane API that it exposes -
unfortunately, no GL implementation provides the 3.x API yet.

the most people care about, as I said, is being able to accelerate
drawing primitives and blending modes and hand them over to the GPU;
mostly, for 2D-inside-3D environments -- see Clutter, cairo-gl and
cairo-drm.

> So all I am asking the GTK team is, please find a solution regarding OpenGL support for GTK-3.0... with or 
> without GtkGLExt...

GtkGLExt is an external project - the GTK+ team has nothing to do with
it.

even if (and I'm saying *if*) GTK+ provided GL integration for
GdkWindows it would basically boil down to two functions:

  void gdk_window_gl_begin (GdkWindow *window);
  void gdk_window_gl_end (GdkWindow *window);

plus a way to set up the GL context. that's mostly agreed upon, if you
read the bug that Javier linked in his email. that's not even close to
the API exposed by GtkGLExt.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.