kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Torsten Hüter" <torstenhtr@...>]

Hi Marco,

> We have already a GAL, wxGC does this work: is an astraction layer nothing
> more nothing less.

This abstraction depends on wxWidgets and is maintained not by KiCad developers. What's needed is an abstraction for KiCad itself, that is *independent* of wxWidgets. Thus porting to other graphics backends is much easier. To a certain degree gr_basic covers already many functions, however it's not object oriented.

> > Cairo and wxGC have approx. the same drawing speed; OpenGL is much
> faster than both. 
> 
> wxGC is CAIRO on Linux, just remapped calls :)
> We have to see if is possible enable OpenGL backend in cairo.

I've changed my implementation a little bit, now I'm using ctime and calculate the frame rate. The results are now more realistic - I'm getting on my system for wxGC 0.55 frames/s, wx + Cairo 0.8 frames/s and OpenGL (wxGLCanvas) 50 frames/s.
The direct calling of Cairo seems to be a slightly bit faster. In my opinion for the developer it's perhaps even easier to use Cairo directly - also it offers more functions than wxGC (which is basically a wrapper).

Yesterday I've compiled the benchmark for wxWidgets + Cairo under Windows - was pretty easy.

--

OpenGL is the hottest candidate if it should be *fast*. Most KiCad graphic primitives are lines, then circles, arcs - circles are easy to draw (with gluDisc), arcs need perhaps our own implementation.
In my opinion a pure OpenGL variant should be considered; already the 3D view of KiCad is faster than the wxGC main screen.

Bye..
Torsten 
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