[Vm-dev] About BitBlt on the Raspberry Pie VM

[Ben Coman]

I have a very cursory understanding of the architecture direction of some
of these, but here goes...  I search around for Cario on RasPi and find not
much.  The in-image interface to Cario is Athens, which was designed to
have changeable back ends.  I see SDL is on RasPi and I though Ronie was
sometime working on SDL for Pharo (I think more focused on I/O and sound
that graphics)?  Maybe later step would be Athens using SDL for its backend
to accelerate things with OpenGL?
cheers -ben

On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 5:17 AM, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:

>
>
> On 05-02-2015, at 12:43 PM, Clément Bera <bera.clement at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hello Tim,
> >
> > Thanks for your answers. Yeah I definitely had misunderstood what you
> did.
>
> That’s ok. I generally misunderstand what I did, too.
>
> >
> > I thought my VM builds got slower on the Pie because of the lack of the
> fast BitBlt you did with Ben Avison. Seemingly this is not the reason so
> I'll check why, it's probably another issue (I'm very busy right now but in
> a few weeks).
>
> A possible problem is the gcc optimiser doing weird stuff. I’m not a fan.
>
> >
> > I'm glad you contributed your code to the main branch. Anyone improving
> the Cog should do that so we share the improvements and it'll get better.
> I'm looking from time to time to your commits on the CogARMCompiler and I
> can't wait to have an ARM JIT too.
>
> Soon, young man, soon.
>
> >
> > About vector graphics, I know many people are using a Cairo binding made
> by Igor in the Pharo community and they're quite happy about it. A guy
> (Ronie Salgado) also implemented some openCL support for GPU, but there are
> not that many users.
>
> I use a very simple connection to Cairo/Pango in nuScratch on the Pi to
> render text, since it does mostly the right thing for NAAWIUT[1] script. It
> works pretty well and is a lot simpler than trying to do the whole job in
> bitblt…
>
> >
> > In any case, I was just wondering if a good JIT compiler could translate
> Bit based graphics to vector based graphics.
>
> Ah, now that sounds like the opposite I what I thought you said
> originally. Taking a bitblt and converting it to calls to a vector lib
> (like cairo?) would be interesting for some important cases, but I can’t
> help thinking that doing the job at the higher level makes a lot more
> sense. An easy case would be a bitblt that was about to fill a rectangular
> area with a simple pattern and a simple combination rule; sure, we could
> trap that and convert it to a GrungoLibv2.1a call to
> drawboxThingExtended(left, bottom, width, height-1, borderwidth, &pattern,
> &clut[x*3]) but why not make a Canvas that goes more directly? Canvases -
> for all that they frequently confuse and exasperate me when I use them -
> are a good way of abstracting out the intent of a drawing operation.
>
> Actually this is possibly a good place to point to Gezira/Nile
> http://www.vpri.org/vp_wiki/index.php/Gezira
>
> I want that on my Pi. A Pi 2 has 4 cores. Making use of them to render
> like that would be just lovely.
>
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Who is General Failure and why is he reading my disk?
>
>
>
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