I see I forgot to answer this properly.

> Sender: squeak-dev-admin at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> From: Bert Freudenberg <bert at isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de>
> Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 21:25:19 +0100 (CET)
> To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
> Cc: Jim.Gettys at hp.com
> Subject: Re: Has anyone succesfully installed squeak on RH 8.0?
> -----
> Yep. I think Squeak could benefit from factoring out the compositing
> (bitblt to display) operations so they can be hardware-accelerated.
> However, there would have to be a platform-specific plugin to encapsulate
> the specifics.  In contrast, OpenGL allows the same kind of compositing
> operations and works across multiple platforms so a single implementation
> can be shared. Apple's Aqua shows that OpenGL indeed is a viable
> foundation for a windowing system. Can you imagine a scenario where
> X Render support would be benefitial over OpenGL?
>

OpenGL support is not universal, and won't be any time soon.

It turns out that modern processors are plain fast enough for most
applications to move to a image compositing based model.  For example,
software implementations of antialiased text alpha composited on 1ghz
class machines run around 30K characters/second.  While not blazing fast
by today's standards, this is more than usable, and hardware assist
is nice, but unnecessary for most 2D apps.

Carl Worth and Keith Packard are working on a rendering library
that will either render to local pixels or take advantage of hardware
via the X Render extension.  Due to some mailing list upheavels, the
best thing this instant is probably to mail cworth at east.isi.edu and
keithp at keithp.com until the dust settles.

The text part of this is done: it is called Xft2.  For graphics, they
are doing the same thing to support the trapezoid primitive and image
scaling primitive, and building splines, etc, on top of that.  Roughly,
you get what you'd find in Adobe Acrobat 1.4 for graphics.  This effort
is called Xr, if I remember correctly.  Lyle Ramshaw has been giving
them help on splines: they are now doing some really gorgeous graphics.
                                - Jim
--
Jim Gettys
Cambridge Research Laboratory
HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard Company
Jim.Gettys at hp.com