Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Why binding to existing widget toolkits doesn't make any sense

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 3:50 PM, Achim Schneider wrote:

Antony Courtney wrote:

...

One issue I think you may encounter, though, is that last time I looked, there was still no high-quality, widely available cross-platform 2-D vector graphics library in C or C++! [...]

Xrender. It appears to map exceptionally well onto FP, is available everywhere X is available (that includes Windoze and OS X) and usually is heavily hardware-accelerated. Additionally, we already have a pure Haskell implementation of the client-side protocol included in XHB.

According to Wikipedia: The X Rendering Extension (Render or XRender) is an X Window System extension to implement Porter-Duff image compositing in the X server. Porter-Duff image compositing is cool and useful, but it's at a much lower level than what I meant by 2-D vector graphics library. A 2-D vector graphics library such as Java2D ( or Quartz on OS/X or GDI+ on Windows ) supports things like computing tight bounding rectangles for arbitrary shapes, hit testing for determining whether a point is inside or outside a shape and constructive area geometry for shape compositing and clipping without dropping down to a raster representation. Pretty clear how to build a 2-D Scenegraph library like Piccolo on top of Java2D or Quartz or GDI+; much less clear to me how to build something like that directly on top of XRender. -Antony