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Re: Opal/CoreGraphics (was Re: UIKit?)


From: Riccardo Mottola
Subject: Re: Opal/CoreGraphics (was Re: UIKit?)
Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:04:35 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.8.1.23) Gecko/20090906 SeaMonkey/1.1.18

Hi,

We must consider that workstations are not our only target. Increasing so in the future. Depending on something like libart or cairo for a small netbook or a handheld is too much of a burden.

Absolutely not true. Modern handhelds don't just come with a GPU, they come with a GPU which has a fully programmable shader pipeline.

There's a reason why UIKit is fundamentally different to AppKit; the constraints of modern handhelds are very different to the constraints of an '80s workstation. Compositing is now much faster because it can be done in hardware and wasting RAM (for buffers) is vastly better than wasting CPU cycles drawing: RAM uses a roughly constant amount of power, while the CPU uses more when it's in use, so you get better power usage by using a CoreAnimation-like model than the old AppKit model. You also have a vastly higher ratio of RAM to pixels on an older handheld like the Nokia 770 than you had on the best workstations NeXT ever sold.

Things are not so rose as you describe. It is clear that if you think in terms of an Atom based netbooks we do not need to worry, those are small workstations in almost every aspects. But there are other devices, netbooks based on MIPS, ARM processors. So there are handhelds. I have one of the Letux netbooks of GoldenDelicious, they have a much more limited framebuffer than devices you describe. So ti also instructive to watch and know about the problems and performance differences Nikolaus or Felipe have when running on interesting non-mainstream devices. If apple decides to put so powerful cpu's in their devices that they burn the white plastic and they start to underclock the CPU... that is their decision. Their devices are expensive anyway and don't always perform as fast as the should either.

The point is that if we have the same dependencies and the same requirements and the same performances of other toolkits, why should somebody wants to use GNUstep? (admitted that we are in any case inferior in several areas)? Just because obj-c is cool? For most that is a problem even... If on the contrary we distinguish ourselves because we run efficiently on a 100$ device, we have a new market segment and we are interesting.

I think many here miss what flexibility can mean for us. Distinction.

I found LindauSTEP discussions to be very very interesting in this regard.

Riccardo






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