kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Martijn Kuipers <martijn.kuipers@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sep 14, 2010, at 10:17 AM, Vesa Solonen wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Sep 2010, Martijn Kuipers wrote:
> 
>> On Sep 13, 2010, at 18:42 PM, Jerry Jacobs wrote:
> 
>>> Also there are still some odd things when using Kicad on OSX for example
>>> the viewport is damn slow of PCBnew. But it is usable and functional.
> 
>> This is probably due to the fact that the cocoa-port of wxWidgets is not yet complete. Will try to look into it, time permitting.
> 
> Before barking at the wxWidgets, it may be of value to look at KiCad drawing code.
I did not want to bark at all. Whenever I need some wxWidgets for OSX I am told by the wxWidgets-lists that the OSX (cocoa) is not complete and not optimal. Sorry if it sounded like I am blaming wxWidgets only, not my intention at all.


> The drawing is damn slow on every platform that does compositing and buffering properly -> OSX and Win upwards Vista. On linux it depends on everything, but proper buffering is not ususally done and the flicker is very annoying. Some performance improvements are on the way from Brian F. Biduloc and kicad-gal from Thorsten. I have no experience or skills to implement these, but from the tests it's evident there is some fondamental mismatch between KiCad drawing code and current graphics technologies. With new vector font the drawing problems begin to show even on schematics with lots of text (vertices).

Thanks for the explanation.


> 
> My main platform is Linux, so there may be some pessimism regarding graphics ;) For example Freeroute on IcedTea runs really fine as long as the window is minimized, but saturates X as soon as something needs to be drawn. Sun Java works _very_ much better, even though it probably does all drawing on the cpu.
> 
> If you find something that makes KiCad on OSX work well, it probably helps on every platform.
I thought it was just an OSX problem, guess not.


Cheers,
Martijn