What do you think about cairo?

rose · 2005-06-19 17:41:27

Cairo, the next gen graphics library, is going to become gtk's dependency. I don't really care about eyecandy and am worried quite a bit that GNOME will become extremely slow. It is heavy now, but the new version of gtk is 1.5-4 times slower than the current version, so GNOME will be even slower.

What do you think? Will Arch switch to gtk+ 2.8 as soon as it is released?

phrakture · 2005-06-19 18:18:05

I'd assume arch would switch, the features added or removed in a new version don't matter to arch. If there's a problem, I'd bring it up to the gtk developers.

cairo, IMHO, is crappy. But it's not slow - it's much faster than imlib2, which fluxbox uses.

paranoos · 2005-06-19 18:19:41

i've used waimea. it's a window manager built entirely on cairo, and it's quite fast. i'm surprised you say it'll be that much slower.

i like to keep my system very clean, and i'm a little disappointed to have more dependencies. however, cairo is fairly small too. i must say i'm fond of the library. the point of adding cairo to gtk is for extended themability, and extra eye candy. i would believe you'd only see a performance hit if you were actually using one of those fancier themes. but that's just speculation.

EDIT: phrakture, you say cairo is crappy. could you elaborate a bit? i'm curious. i'm fond of cairo, it's fast, it's svg (which is very nice) ... i think this will help linux in the eyecandy department, to compete with OSX. people will be impressed when they see screenshots and demos, which is a good thing i think.

phrakture · 2005-06-19 18:35:50

paranoos:
Yeah I guess I should clarify. I don't think the ideas or eyecandy of cairo is crappy. Hell, with glitz the thing becomes and uber speed demon.
The problem I have is that the cairo devs drastically change their API all the time, and have very poor documentation.

Yeah, alot of pre-1.0 projects change their API alot, but cairo is used by a huge amount of apps.

In addition they tend to chane pre/post conditions of the api calls, without any documentation. For instance, there was an issue when WMII was in pre 1.0 stage... an upgrade of cairo removed validation for a window variable. So instead of having an API call fail due to a window not being valid, cairo tried to draw on the window anyway and would segfault and kill X....

arooaroo · 2005-06-19 19:18:15

paranoos wrote:

i've used waimea. it's a window manager built entirely on cairo, and it's quite fast. i'm surprised you say it'll be that much slower.

I can't find the article any more, but I recall hearing about some rough analysis suggesting that the gtk/cairo build currently under development is 2-3x slower than the "normal" gtk. This does seem to go against the grain of logic as it was always thought that speed would be quicker, as Cairo is hardware accelerated.

Perhaps it's just some teething problems with the integration. But there are a lot of fears as Gnome fans are already complaining about sluggishness and the thought of the underlying toolkit adding an extra penalty will not appeal - no matter how pretty.

EDIT: found the link. It's on the gnome mailing list here.

Gullible Jones · 2005-06-19 19:33:29

I don't have a problem with GTK depending on Cairo. Does seem a bit... unnecessary... But Cairo isn't that big, and from what I hear doesn't present speed problems, so I'm okay with it.

iBertus · 2005-06-19 19:42:30

I only hope that these supposed speed issues are fixed with GTK before the new version is released. I'm a GNOME user and find the current toolkit to be sluggish at times, but I can put up with it. If it gets slower I may look for another DE.

iphitus · 2005-06-20 00:22:29

ibertus, it can depend on the theme you use, a poorly written theme or some pixmap/svg based themes will be slower.

iBertus · 2005-06-20 01:18:55

iphitus: yes, i am aware of this fact. the fact still remains that GNOME is getting more bloated, not less.

iphitus · 2005-06-20 09:30:04

Gnome != GTK.

iphitus

rhfrommn · 2005-06-20 16:09:45

Funny - reusing a name that for several years in the early 90's was the codename for what became Windows 95. Hopefully this product works a little better.

glitz · 2005-06-20 19:37:47

After reading this blog (screenshot!), I think Cairo will be a good addition to GTK. I'm just not too sure whether it should be added at this time. Perhaps it's more convenient to try and make a faster and stable X server such as xgl.

arooaroo · 2005-06-20 19:41:25

Too be honest, that blog hardly "sold" Cario - especially if you get a significant performance hit just for better anti-aliased 2d objects.

glitz · 2005-06-20 21:26:29

Obviously it doesn't sell Cairo, but at least this blog entry isn't as biased towards Cairo concerning the performance impact.

On the good news front, I have to say I didn't feel it being much slower than 2.6

So yes, it might be slower now, but if this blog is correct, the performance hit won't be that big and some things are getting faster already. Cairo might not look good at first sight, but remember, the 2.6 kernel has been criticized for instability because of new features, the current FreeBSD 5.X releases weren't as good as the older 4.X releases,.. Sometimes you have got to make progress, even though it might seem worse than the current situation.

JGC · 2005-06-21 10:09:37

For cairo/GTK 2.8, we will follow Gnome. If Gnome 2.12 doesn't depend on GTK 2.8, then we won't use it before the 2.8.x pointreleases are released. I've seen weird things with the first 2.4.0 and 2.6.0 snapshots of GTK, I don't want to have those things again if there is no need for.

Expect prereleases in unofficial repositories though, after the hal/dbus transition I'm starting a gnome 2.11 repository again.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-06-19 17:41:27

What do you think about cairo?

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#5 2005-06-19 19:18:15

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