Tango Graphics Package

[Mike Parker]

Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> 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 :( ).

No, there will be nothing to handle any image formats. You can read more 
about it in my reply to Oskar.

> 
> 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.
>