Re: The search continues...

[Magnus Norddahl <mbn@dark.x.dtu.dk>]

> I downloaded and had a look at ClanLib... it had some
> good points and some bad points.  Two big things are
> keeping me from using it though: no XSHM, and no
> main() (I like to be in control :-).

Ok, lets first take a look on the main() problem. If you have ever developed
a win32 application, you would know that their main() function is called
winmain(). Since ClanLib is trying to be as platform independent as
possible, we created a new way of initializing your application - in the
same way as MFC does.

We will probably sometime in the future change the initialization part, so
you will be able to use an ordinary main() function - but this has very low
priority since we're not annoyed by it. If you believe in the Bazaar model,
you can fix the problem yourself and send a patch to us...

It is correct, that the current version of ClanLib doesn't use XSHM - but as
always, there is a reason. X Window has a wonderful thing called Pixmaps -
this IS what I normally call surfaces. They CAN be hardware accelerated
because I have no direct pointer to its pixel data. Naive as I was, I
expected the XFree86 X servers to take advantage of their gfx cards hardware
accelerated blit operations, thus providing performance as DirectX. In real
life, I havn't found a X server that takes advantage of this - so now I'm
stuck with a slower X11 implementation just because I expected things done
the right way<tm> in the Linux world. :-(

If you take a look on ClanLib's structure, there's nothing preventing it
from using XSHM in the future - so I cannot really understand why this
should be _the_ reason not to choose ClanLib.

> (I'm still hoping that the library will be able to flip/turn
> the surfaces while rendering, but we'll see).

No gfx card can do this using hardware acceleration. It is faster to store
the image in all its different positions and then take advantage of hw
accel.

--
Magnus Norddahl
ClanSoft