[forum] Some perspective from the cheap seats...

[Allen Akin]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 08:42:29PM -0800, Keith Packard wrote:
| Even still, I think nearly all of Render matches the hardware pretty well; 
| it's a tiny little extension, providing image compositing and primitive 
| geometric objects and not a whole lot else.  I'd be interested to know 
| what areas are broken so that we can explore how best to fix them.

In the OpenGL community we wondered why things that were accelerated in
hardware and (in some cases long ago) incorporated into the API were
being reinvented (with slight differences) in a new 2D API.  It's a
bummer to see yet another drawing surface abstraction, imaging
operations not integrated with the texturing subsystem, new rules for
polygon rasterization, etc. when we thought those were essentially
solved problems.

You were able to reconcile a lot of those conflicts, and explain where
the OpenGL semantics fell short in some others.  But I still would have
preferred adding a few small OpenGL extensions and re-using the rest of
the 3D infrastructure rather than creating a new parallel
infrastructure.  Every project is short-staffed, so reducing duplication
of effort would have been good.  And OpenGL as a platform has decent
availability; shipping on cell phones next year, for example.

I'm going to take a look at the current Render specification to see if I
can make better-considered comments.  But I'm strictly a volunteer these
days, and I don't have enough time to do everything I'd like.  (I still
owe you a report on using OpenGL to render antialiased text -- something
I've had working since November, but need to design an experiment to
quantify the differences between several approaches.)

Allen