Re: [gtkmm] the canvas

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com> writes:

> however, i found out from havoc on gtk-list last week that the Gnome2
> canvas has been rendered quite buggy by a set of changes made to it
> that fundamentally changed the internal implementation of many canvas
> item types. in fact, several significant GNOME projects that use the
> canvas no longer use GnomeCanvas at all, but a stripped down version
> called "foocanvas" that has all the anti-alias (read: client-side
> rendering) canvas support ripped out. 

I don't really know that much about the internals of the canvas, but
I've been using libgnomecanvasmm2 for several of my projects and
haven't seen any bugs yet.

Among other things, I've used it for a game where I store a lot of
pixbufs on the canvas on top of each other. Works fine. The only
problem is that it's a bit slow on redrawing the whole thing when
completely obscured by another window. But otherwise there's no
flicker.

> i just want to warn people that the canvas is not what it once was,
> nor what it could have been. its a very disappointing development for
> me. it appears likely that the ardour project will have to continue
> using the GtkCanvas (a backport of GnomeCanvas from Gnome1 to pure
> GTK) for the foreseeable future. this is real pain because its not
> wrapped by gtkmm at this time, and one of the big wins from moving to
> gtkmm2 was going to be adopting a properly C++-wrapped canvas. oh
> well. 

I recall a huge discussion on gnome-devel long before Gnome 2.0 was
released about the possible future direction of the canvas. Also,
wasn't someone looking into merging it into GTK+? It doesn't seem to
be on the schedule on www.gtk.org/plan/ Did everyone lose interest?
Perhaps the discussion need a kickstart?

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~olau/