[squeak-dev] Squeak graphics colloquium

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Thu Sep 28 02:30:40 UTC 2017


Jecel,

Thanks for this excellent summary, and thanks to Tim for organizing the
discussion. I was not able to be there, so it is really good to see your
notes here.

Dave

On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 05:33:15PM -0300, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
> The meeting has just ended after two hours and a half. Thanks again,
> Tim, for organizing this! We had six particpants.
> 
> I created this sort of agenda:
> -----------------------------
> we need Squeak Graphics to be:
> 
> 1) pretty
> 2) fast
> 3) everywhere
> 4) easy
> 5) compatible
> ------------------------------
> 
> The focus of the Board meetings so far has been on the first 3 items.
> 
> Item 1 was what started all this. Tim needs better quality graphics for
> his virtual dials. Moving from bitmap graphics to vectors with some nice
> rendering scheme like Juan's Morphic 3 would help. The VPRI people
> produced Nile/Gezira which could adopt the Morphic 3 rendering
> algorithm. Craig has been doing interesting stuff with SqueakJS
> including WebGL.
> 
> To make it fast we need to make use of GPUs and multiple cores. Juan has
> been using OpenCL in his own work and Dan wants to have a version of
> Nile use SPIR-V (essentially a binary version of OpenCL). Unfortunately
> some platforms we are interested in don't have OpenCL nor even the
> desktop version of OpenGL. The most common denominator is OpenGL ES 2.0
> from 2007.
> 
> Lawson showed two Youtube videos he made in 2012 combining OpenGL and
> Morphic.
> 
> Merik mentioned the KWorld and KScript work from VPRI that goes with
> Nile. Tweak was also discussed. This time we didn't go into what is
> being done in Pharo except for a brief mention of the Sparta / Moz2D
> work.
> 
> All of the old OpenGL stuff in Squeak used the original fixed pipeline
> model but OpenGL ES 2 is incompatible with that is uses shaders for
> everything. A simple interface to that has the problem of shaders being
> black boxes in the form of Squeak strings that get passed to the drivers
> without allowing any kind of debugging. One solution would be to have an
> OpenGL ES implementation in Squeak which could be used both for
> debugging applications and to enhance the Cog simulator so not only
> could it deal with x86 processors (via Bochs) but also with GPUs.
> 
> Obviously quite a bit more was discussed (some of it off topic) but I am
> trying to keep this short. I plan to create a "map" showing MVC, Self
> Morphic, Squeak Morphic and so on as software stacks in the style of OSI
> network models. Tihs should help with further discussions.
> 
> See you next time!
> -- Jecel
> 


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