Scientific computing with D

[Bill Baxter]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Chad J
<gamerchad at __spam.is.bad__gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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 :)

You may know about these things already but...

The two things I had my eyes on when I was last looking into 2D
rendering were Amanith (www.amanith.org) and OpenVG
(http://www.khronos.org/openvg/)

It looks like Amanith has morphed into a commercial OpenVG
implementation... hmm I think it was open source (GPL?) for a while.
It was original just meant to be a nice 2D rendering lib on top of
OpenGL.

There's also the "glitz" backend for Cairo, though I think it's also a
little dead.  It wasn't really functional last I checked.  And Cairo
wasn't very Windows-friendly then either.

--bb