Re: Motif support

[Po Lu]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> Ok. Thanks for confirming. By the way, what is the reason? Maybe they
> have implemented the functionality they needed? Is it considered
> complete?

No, it's because their last user (GTK+) has stopped using Cairo in its
latest release, replacing it with a custom alternative that can only be
used with GTK.

> Hardware acceleration only on X is fine. Win32/Mac are proprietary
> OS:s, so if Cairo does support gpu acceleration on those, I think it
> is fine. Current Emacs does not use gpu acceleration anyway (more than
> what OS uses to render windows), so I don't think it is a major issue.

Emacs does use GPU acceleration on every supported platform, as long as
that is present.

> I can only speak for win32, since I have never owned a mac machine so
> have no idea how it works overthere. It is PITA if you gonna compile
> Cairo on Win32 yourself from the sources because you have to chase and
> compile all the deps, glib, libxm2 and co and so on. But it is not
> PITA if you install precompiled one, or ou choose to install it via
> MSYS2 which is as simple as intalling it on Arch Linux. Anyway, it
> wouldn't be problem for Emacs, Emacs does not include Cairo sources,
> and even if you prefer to compile it yourself, since Emacs is build on
> MSYS2 (is cygwin officially supported?), building Cairo is just one
> command line away, just as in gnu/Linux, so I don't think it is PITA.

[..]

> Anyway, if gdk or cairo itself as a 2d drawing library to implement
> guis is not acceptable, there are others. Personally I would prefer
> emacs to do gui in Lisp, not in C, so that C core could be simplifed
> to just deal with OS windows, fonts and input, but as I understand
> from the discussion, it is not acceptable.

I can speak for Haiku at least when I say that Cairo isn't very
portable.  On every not-that-popular platform (such as Haiku), you can
only use image surfaces, and then you have to work out how to integrate
them well with the toolkit provided by that platform, and things start
to go downhill from there.

Besides, it will bring us no benefit at all, except to cause annoyance
to many users.  (Have you ever tried making Fontconfig work properly on
other platforms?  Cairo needs that for fonts.)  Most of the mess we have
results from having to take care of the idiosyncrasies of each window
system, and not implementing the basic drawing operations for that
window system.