[LispM-Hackers] Graphics questions

[James A. Crippen]

I've been thinking about graphics display problems lately, after JM
mentioned them.  I think the best thing might just be to create our own
graphics abstraction and then port that abstraction to various display
systems.  One could be written with some relatively flexible X widget
library like Qt, one could be GGI, one could be raw Xlib, etc,
etc.  Considering the wide variety of port targets this is most likely
going to guarantee maximum portability.

The only problem with an internal graphics abstraction is the cost in
speed.  I'd figure that we could get around this by making a large part of
the cost be amortized at compile time with the use of an ugly mess of
macros or suchlike.  But I don't have a concrete conception of this yet.  
I do know that we're fast approaching the point where we will want to at
least do some textual graphics for initialization.  This will probably
become a major problem.

I might go look at how some of the game system emulators do this,
particularly those that are highly portable.  I don't know if any are
actually ported to systems other than Windows and Linux, but I suppose
there's at least one or two out there that are.

I particularly don't want to become entirely dependent on one library for
all of our graphics needs, especially one which is only ported to a small
handful of platforms.  This needs some heavy thought though.  Does anyone
have any suggestions or previous experience?  Any graphics libraries that
they're familiar with or at least know of?

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james@unlambda.com> ,-./-.  Anchorage, Alaska,
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