wishlists

[Norman Vine]

Sean Gillies writes:
>
> > Sean Gillies wrote:
> >>
> >> * explore using Cairo instead of GD.  Cairo has the cartoline stuff
> >> built in, and can take advantage of graphic accelerators.
> >>
> >
> > "take advantage of graphics accelerators"? Do you mean the hardware
> > graphics accelerators built into your VGA display adapter? Is there a
> > way that a server could share the same graphics accelerator with 10
> > concurrent requests?
> >
>
> I doubt it.  But some people are using mapscript for desktop apps and
> it could be helpful to them.  Myself, I'm intrigued by the richer
> graphic stroking and filling of Cairo.

I don't see much differance between using an offscreen Hardware Drawing
Surface and the GD memory device.  The limitation here is only one thread
can do the drawing and all the Surfaces need to have the same Pixel Format.

There are issues with having multiple CPUs where you actually can be doing
more then one thing at a time but since it is likely that most time is spent getting
to the data it might be advantageous to borrow from the Gameing and VisSim
communities where the CPU horsepower is applied to getting the data into a form
that the Hardware GFX likes as the Hardware should be able to draw just about
anything ***much*** faster then any software implemnetation and waiting for the
Drawing Thread to get free shouldn't be too much of a burden :-)

Cheers

Norman