Re: [XaraXtreme-dev] Move from CDraw to AGG

[Luke Hart <lukeh@xxxxxxxx>]

Alex Bligh wrote:
> Arlen,
>
> I haven't seen any posts from  you about Antigrain here, which is
> the best place to discuss dev issues. I'm traveling at the moment
> so have not got a huge amount of time to investigate Antigrain, but
> I've looked at it before. Briefly my observations are:
> 1. It is more similar to GDraw/CDraw than Cairo is, so would probably be
>   easier to integrate, but
AGG is more of a modular graphical toolkit, making extensive use of C++ 
templates. Rendering pipelines are built up from individual template 
based components. I'd say that in fact Cairo is more similar to CDraw 
than AGG is. Implementing an interface to XaraLX would involve 
implementing the existing operations in terms of these render pipelines 
(and you'd better hope that your compilers template optimizations are 
good or your could end-up with massively duplicated code).
> 2. It doesn't have many of the advantages of Cairo (for instance Cairo's
>   printing abilities). Nor does it give the possibility of benefit on
>   h/w accelerated platforms.
AGG is currently much more efficient than Cairo (my simple tests 
indicated getting on for an order of magnitude), so may well be better 
in the short term.

   Luke