Status of Cairo backend

[Yen-Ju Chen]

I am curious how experimental the cairo backend is now ?
The last time I tried, it works mostly fine, except the scrolling problem,
which can be worked around by always scrolling a full view instead  of
a fraction of view,
because it will trigger a full redraw than copying one fraction of
view to another place.
Is there any other known show-stopper bug ?

Another thing I am wondering is that currently,
cairo backend try to do whatever art backend do.
So here is the combination of backend:

x11+xlib
x11+art
x11+cairo
win32+winlib

Considering cairo is a cross-platform solution,
it can theoretically do

x11+cairo
win32+cairo

I wonder whether it would be easier to have a stand-alone x11 server
for cairo, like this:

cairo_x11 + cairo_render, and in the unknown future
cairo_win32 + cairo_render (I don't really care about this one :).

In that way, cairo_x11 + cairo_render can take advantage of cairo
without worrying breaking art backend.
For example, I remember cairo currently write image into a buffer
shared with art backend.
If there is a cairo_x11, it can by-pass this buffer and draw straight
onto window,
which may (or may not) make things easier.
To me, cairo backend and art backend are roughly equivalent.
x11+xlib is for old or slow machine, probably also remote one.
If a machine can run x11+art, I think it can also run cairo_x11+cairo_render.
So once cairo backend is stable, art backend is not useful anymore.
Therefore, it makes sense to me to have a window server (cairo_x11)
exclusively for cairo backend (cairo_render),
if it helps the adaptation of cairo backend for regular users.

Anyway, it is just my 2 cents.

Have fun

Yen-Ju