Tango Graphics Package

[Bruno Medeiros]

Mike Parker wrote:
> Dear D community
> 
> Tango is going visual! Headless visual! With the addition of a general 
> purpose 2D graphics package, Tango users will be able to generate 2D 
> images on the fly for use in a variety of applications, on the server or 
> the desktop. The package supports basic 2D primitives, complex shapes, 
> fonts, alpha-blending, transformations, paths, styles, and other common 
> 2D graphics operations. The design is inspired by several existing APIs, 
> such as Java2D and OpenVG, so anyone who has experience with other APIs 
> should be able to get up and running quickly.
> 
> The API is designed to support third-party implementations for cases 
> when the default (software) implementation does not fit the bill. These 
> additional implementations are free to accelerate both the buffering and 
> the rendering, and an OpenGL wrapper will likely be provided for those 
> systems with OpenGL support. All implementations will support headless 
> systems.
> 
> Contact:
> http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango/wiki/Contact
> 
> Signed,
> 
> The Tango Team
> 
> http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango/wiki/Contributors
> 
> ----
> 
> Tango is a cohesive runtime and library for the D programming language. 
> A feature list can be found on 
> http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango/wiki/Features

Sounds excelent! Will routines for loading various kinds of image 
formats (jpg, gif, etc.) be present here? I know Derelict has a wrapper 
for SDL_image, but perhaps a more D'ified version would be useful for a 
graphics library, *as well as just having a standard* Image type would 
be useful.
I say this since in this semester I've been working in C++ again, (in 
another university game project), and since I use several third-party 
code modules, I have about 3 different image loading libraries (and none 
of them is SDL_image nor is full featured like it :( ).

But I would also like to point out Oskar's point about monolithicness 
vs. modularity. As Tango gets bigger it does seem overkill to bundle all 
that functionality together, specially if it happens to start getting 
(non-core library) features useful outside of the server world.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - MSc in CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D