Re: Motif support

[Arthur Miller]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>> Than yes, Emacs would need some other abstraction layer. Is it
>> realistic to use just Cairo, since it is already in use in Emacs? Also
>> Cairo has support for using GPU. It is just that there are rumors that
>> Cairo is deprecated or not developed any more, but I don't know how
>> true it is, I don't really follow the web rumors.
>
> These aren't rumors, the Cairo developers are indeed not very active
> anymore.
Ok. Thanks for confirming. By the way, what is the reason? Maybe they have
implemented the functionality they needed? Is it considered complete?

> GPU acceleration is also really just supported on X
Hardware acceleration only on X is fine. Win32/Mac are
proprietary OS:s, so if Cairo does support gpu acceleration on those, I think it
is fine. Current Emacs does not use gpu acceleration anyway (more than what OS
uses to render windows), so I don't think it is a major issue.

>                                                          getting Cairo
> to work on any other platform is a massive PITA.

I can only speak for win32, since I have never owned a mac machine so have no
idea how it works overthere. It is PITA if you gonna compile Cairo on Win32
yourself from the sources because you have to chase and compile all the deps,
glib, libxm2 and co and so on. But it is not PITA if you install precompiled
one, or ou choose to install it via MSYS2 which is as simple as intalling it on
Arch Linux. Anyway, it wouldn't be problem for Emacs, Emacs does not include
Cairo sources, and even if you prefer to compile it yourself, since Emacs
is build on MSYS2 (is cygwin officially supported?), building Cairo is just one
command line away, just as in gnu/Linux, so I don't think it is PITA.

Anyway, if gdk or cairo itself as a 2d drawing library to implement guis is
not acceptable, there are others. Personally I would prefer emacs to do gui in
Lisp, not in C, so that C core could be simplifed to just deal with OS windows,
fonts and input, but as I understand from the discussion, it is not acceptable.