Re: GtkGLExt (was Re: Gtk 3.0)

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 18:11 -0500, Braden McDaniel wrote:

I have the impression that my message is not coming through correctly,
because I keep saying the same things. :-)

> > 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.
>
> It is a common requirement for apps that want to do 3D rendering with a 
> cross-platform codebase.

yes. and that, apart from games and scientific/technical applications,
it's not at all common.

>  Biting off Clutter and its dependency chain is 
> not something developers of such an app are likely to want to incur; and 
> Clutter probably won't provide adequate functionality in a lot of cases.

which dependency chain? it's the same as gtk+.

> > 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.
>
> The volume of code currently using Clutter, cairo-gl, and cairo-drm 
> would be dwarfed by that using OpenGL directly.
>
> I think your use of the term "niche" is a little unusual.

the amount of code using OpenGL is relatively limited (hence "niche")
compared to the rest of applications in the GNOME stack (or even in the
whole Linux ecosystem); it's *usage* is limited, not the size of the
codebase.

cairo-drm and cairo-gl are experimental surfaces that have less than 6
months each: it's obvious that the size codebase is limited.

Clutter is a new project, compared to OpenGL, and yet *it's* *not*
intended to cover the same usage of OpenGL. its intended use covers a
canvas for writing applications, not molecule viewers or 3D shooters.

that's why GtkGLExt can still be perfectly fine outside of the gtk+
codebase; it provides much more than setting up a GL context, which
would be the agreed API for gtk+ to expose, and given the amount of
applications actively requiring to drop into GL without any sort of
canvas, then it might make sense to keep GtkGLExt exactly as it is.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.