[squeak-dev] We need to talk about graphics

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Thu Jul 9 20:39:42 UTC 2020


What are we going to actually try to do here? Who has time/interest/skill?

Yes, Juan's suggested bitblt improvements sound good. Indeed pretty much anything he's done would be. This all has the advantage of being 'in system' too, with maybe some VM work to get the best results.

Connecting to outside libraries always has costs; after all they're not exactly likely to be set up just as we'd like. An advantage of a decent open source library is that we could at least consider hacking at it to make a version that talks nicely to our bitmaps instead of of messing around with copy/convert to get the results back. More work though... Another option *might* be to use the algorithms if we can't really use the code. Still more work.

We have a framework for dynamic translation in the cog vms. We could use much of it to do dynamically translated bitblts. The ARM specialised bitblt code kinda-sorta does that but we could do much better I think. Maybe that would make borrowing algorithms more sensible than linking to an outside library?

I'm not a huge fan of a direct connect to openGL because of the issues like Apple not supporting it any more, and which version can a Raspberry Pi run etc. That might make sometihng like Skia more sensible since it seems to be aimed at multiple back ends and so maybe we could benefit indirectly. Of course, it leaves us vulnerable to Error 33.

The Nile/Gezira stuff obviously sounds great but there is the question of actually getting it working usefully, let alone finishing it. Will that ever happen? Is what exists good enough and complete enough to be of use? 

There is a downloadable 'Frank' image that seems to start up ok at http://tinlizzie.org/~ohshima/Frank-170908.zip  It is a Squeak 4.4 image as far as I can tell so you need an older VM of roughly that vintage - pre-Spur anyway.

The small examples mostly work ok (see things like GeziraCanvas class>example* & GZKernel class>example*) though one or two take a very long time.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
State-of-the-art: What we could do with enough money.




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