Scientific computing with D

[Daniel Keep]

Chad J wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>> 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
> 
> Cairo... ugh... for svg rendering it pulls in RSVG (IIRC) and that
> pulled in some Gnome deps (?!).  So it had it's fair share of violating
> my criterion of no unreasonable dependencies and liberal licensing.  I
> think we concur that this one is not on the list :/

Well, Cairo isn't an SVG library; it's a rendering API like OpenGL.  If
you want to read or write SVG, you need another library for that.

As for RSVG pulling in Gnome dependencies, that's because it's a Gnome
library.

Honestly, I've used Cairo from D a number of times, and it's very, VERY
nice to work with.  If all you're doing is 2D, it beats the pants off
OpenGL.  As for acceleration, I believe that it *is* accelerated under
Windows provided you're rendering to an actual GDI surface (also
providing that the video card drivers accelerate GDI calls.)  But if
you're rendering to an image buffer then no, it isn't.  Which sucks, but
there you go.

Incidentally, I've got a visualisation project underway that's using
Cairo to render the output; works just fine.

[ This message brought to you by "that guy" who wrote the Cairo bindings
  and feels compelled to defend his choices so he doesn't look like a
  burke. ]

  -- Daniel