Re: GTK+ 4.0 and Clutter 2.0: rainbows and unicorns

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;

On 2011-09-01 at 11:18, Andres G. Aragoneses wrote:
 
> Small question Emanuelle:
> 
> On 08/31/2011 04:10 PM, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> >...
> >Giovanni Campagna recently submitted a GDK backend for Clutter[0] which
> >I'm fairly keen on merging during 1.9 (the cycle for Gnome 3.4) and
> >using as the default backend when compiled on X11.
> >...
> 
> Oh, does that mean that a Clutter animation could work (if using
> this Gdk-backend for Clutter) with a non-X11 GDK Backend like the
> Broadway backend?

Clutter already supports non-X11 backends like Windows and Quartz; what
GDK would provide is a single API to use a wrapper for the surface to
draw on and windowing system events.

on Windows, we could have a D3D backend for Cogl - we said multiple
times that it would be a welcomed addition, if anyone wants to work on
it; there's also the ANGLE project, which provides a GL implementation
on top of the Direct3D shading language, and that can be used as a
stop-gap. finally, GL works fine on Windows, so we can use GL there.

OS X already uses OpenGL, so it's not a problem.

Broadway is another matter entirely, though. Broadway is essentially
rendering content into image buffers and sending them over the wire to
an HTTP client; this is incompatible with GL, for obvious reasons, but
it's not stricly impossible to implement something like the GPU
rendering pipeline that Chrome implements for its multi-process split: a
"Broadway" backend for Cogl would send commands to a renderer process,
for instance. alternatively there's still the possibility to write a
WebGL backend as a command pipeline.

Clutter also has backends for Wayland, for native framebuffers using
EGL, and for Android, just for the sake of completeness.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi