Re: [DotGNU] Cairo / Mono

[Thomas Fritzsche]

Hi Dotgnu,

you are totally right that dotgnu is much better than mono currently is.
The mono project has just begun to do it this way.
But for me it looks hard to implement all the tricky details of the
Synstem.Drawing/GDI+ layer. So using cairo looks interesting for me. Cairo
has a rich set of complex vector graphic functions and only a few things
are missing e.g. special features for text rendering.

So I'm not an expert of the dotnet architecture but it looks like you have
different low level layers depending of the system-architecture (Win/X).

Because dotnet is ported to such a wide range of system, I guess that it
is not to hard to have a "cairo" layer. But I don't know if the cairo
renderer is fast enough for this job.

So maybe we need a simple/fast/small version (for e.g. PDA's)  which
implements only 95% of the standard and a 100% version for systems that
can use e.g. cairo etc.

So I'm wondering that it's possible to mix cairo rendering with Xsharp to
do the easy jobs in Xsharp and the rest in cairo!?

Kind regards,
 Thomas


------------------------------------------------------
> > using cairo is prettty much the why the mono
> project would like to
> > implement SWF now after they droped the wine
> approach.

Adding another hard depedency (soft dependencies like
Xft which can be --disable-Xft'd is ok) is bad news
for pnet's portability.

Imagine having to port Cairo to tinyX :)

> > Why should dotgnu/mono invent the wheel new?
>
> DotGNU already has this wheel: a system-independent,
> toolkit-based, non-Wine
> approach to building a WinForms implementation from
> the ground up.  We won't
> be re-inventing it.

A one year and one month old wheel if I'm not wrong :)

> already managed to get our  WinForms working on
Mono,
>  or it would be pretty easy to do so.

I think mono broke that recently when
[DllImport("X11")]
stopped importing libX11.so .. (or maybe there is
something wrong with my box).

Gopal