Subject: Re: Graphic Images
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Apr 19 2001 - 19:02:37 CDT
Paul wrote:
> - gdk-pixbuf
> - ImageMagick or miniMagick
> - a thin layer of our own
>
>all rely on the same underlying libraries (libpng, libjpeg, etc.) that we'd
>be using *anyways*, then it should be pretty easy to choose between them
>according to the following criteria:
>
> - which is someone willing to maintain?
I'm willing to maintain IM or GdkPixbuf, as I'm sure others are too.
> - which has the best platform coverage?
For now, that'd be IM
> - which bloats our binary the least?
Toss-up between a miniIM and GdkPixbuf. Now, which one is already in RAM?
... A full-blown IM has a lot more functionality than we'll ever need. How
well can we separate out what we don't want/need? I honestly don't know and
respectfully defer to those that do.
> - which is most efficient at run-time? (both speed and memory)
GdkPixbuf significantly outperforms IM in both speed and memory usage for
what we need it for. We might do better natively ("roll our own"), but I
don't think that anyone wants to maintain that.
>In particular, it sounds like we should focus on the exact APIs we'd be
>using, and the code path that gets us in and out of the underlying
>libraries
>as efficiently as possible.
I'm all for creating an Interface that we can have several backends for,
much like the SpellChecker interface. Then we can easily have QuickTime,
GdkPixbuf, IM backends, etc...
*Very* simply put, the GdkPixbuf API looks like this:
load_from_file()
load_from_data()
scale()
render()
Who wants to design this and post it for peer-review? I can do it, but not
until next week sometime.
Dom
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Apr 19 2001 - 19:02:40 CDT