Learning about Window toolkits

[clementl]

Hi everybody,

I'm interested in how windowing toolkits (like qt, gtk+) work under the hood. I assume that they don't use Xlib primitives to draw an interface to the screen. Do they use OpenGL, or some other custom drawing system?

Can anybody tell me, or point me to a source where I can learn about this?


Thanks,
ClementL

[curaga]

Pixmaps are still Xlib primitives. For source, read each toolkit FLTK is small and easy to understand, so perhaps start there.

[clementl]

Pixmaps are still Xlib primitives. For source, read each toolkit FLTK is small and easy to understand, so perhaps start there.

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. I was hoping for some kind of explanation/tutorial though, as that speeds up the learning process drastically.

Although fltk seems to have a very simple theme. I can imagine that fancy interfaces need some kind of hardware-accelleration. Or am I overestimating the overhead of those toolkits?