Scientific computing with D

[Chad J]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 9:14 AM, Chad J
> <gamerchad at __spam.is.bad__gmail.com> wrote:
>> ...
>> Maybe port the 2.4?  ;)
> 
> Yeh definintely.  I'm not even going to look at the 2.5 GPL version.
> And wrapping that is just out of the question.  Well, you could but I
> don't see the point when D's templates are so rockin.
> 
> As for stagnation, the 2.4 version is actually very mature.  The
> mailing list is still pretty active, and some folks are maintaining it
> over on SourceForge, I think.   Anyway, it seems Mr. AGG himself isn't
> really working on AGG either, these days since he got a job where he
> gets paid to do similar stuff.  Probably not enough time, and too much
> legal murkiness about his work product vs. his free time effort.
> There was just a big debate on the AGG mailing list yesterday where
> people were saying AGG is withering away, and half dozen people sprang
> up to say it wasn't dead it just works fine and doesn't need much
> maintenance.
> 
> So that's a pretty ideal situation for porting to D.  If it's pretty
> much a finished lib, then there won't even be much in the way of
> headaches merging in new updates.  Since there probably won't be many.
> 
> Anyway, antiailiasing of AGG looks very nice.  :-)   I did my previous
> (C++) project using AGG for rendering.  But this time I just decided
> to go with GL.  GL is way easier to work with, but I do miss the
> quality of AGG rendering.  MSAA/FSAA just can't hold a candle to
> genuine primitive-level antialiasing (2~16 gradations vs 256).
> 
> Still, most of us have pretty decent graphics hardware on our desks
> these days.  It's sad that we still can't really use it to get decent
> quality 2D graphics.  So really I think the future is not AGG but some
> clever shaders to do AA with graphics hardware.  I think DX10 class
> hardware opens up new possibilities here.  And probably the distant
> distant future is back to just brute force 256x oversampling :-)
> 
> --bb

Interesting.

So AGG is not dead and that looks like it'd be a nice project.  A high
quality software rendering SVG lib complementing a GL project.

It would also be neat to see shaders/GPGPU stuff applied to an SVG
renderer.  Not just for the AA but doing all of the filters quickly too
would be great.

Right now though I'm just trying to write a reference render path
without shaders or anything--something that even the really old hardware
will run.  I think I might require a stencil buffer.  Oh dear.
Hopefully this also makes porting to portable devices easier.
Eventually shader/GPGPU trickery can be applied to optimize and add
awesome, though it's probably not worth enough to me personally.  I'd
happily watch other people do it though :)