A Call For Improving Cairo Rendering With Its Own Test Suite No Longer Even Passing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Call For Improving Cairo Rendering With Its Own Test Suite No Longer Even Passing

GNOME developer Federico Mena-Quintero has made a call to action for trying to get some support for improving Cairo, the widely-used 2D rendering library. It's own test suite is no longer passing with interest in Cairo seeming to wane these days...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Call-To-Improve-Cairo-Rendering

[SpyroRyder]

Pretty sure i heard about this being a problem 3 or so years ago. If thats correct then its kinda frightening.

[Linuxhippy]

Cairo was, a decade ago, one of the key components of the plans to modernize the linux 2d infrastructure: Xrender <--> Cairo <---> Application/Toolkit.
However this plan was full of assumptions that did not work out.

In general it seems the devs who designed those APIs didn't talk to GPU designers before:

Xrender was rather broken by design (complex to accelerate - almost impossible without shaders) and has servere weakness when it comes to geometry (15 years later trapezoids are still slow and a nightmare to GPU-accelerate) and cairo was designed to build on top of it. Long story short, now we have those performance-wise broken-by-design APIs used everywhere and still tons of toolkits rely in them.

I guess the situation will only get better, with more and more performance-sensitive 2D apps moving to OpenGL or Vulkan.

[M@GOid]

Well, they can always deal with this problem by the Gnome Way®, ditching it on the next release, arguing is unmaintained code and replacing it with nothing.

Oh wait, they cannot do it this time? huehuehue

[schmidtbag]

Typo:

Actually for once Michael's grammar/spelling was right. "It" in this context is referring to Cairo. Possessive "it" doesn't use an apostrophe.

[Adarion]

Cairo having issues doesn't sound new to me either. For a rather crucial cornerstone there should be some paid developers. And yes, rendering is sometimes slow. You have a super-duper shiny and nice and fat hexacore or larger, a modern GPU - but some things still make you feel like you're on W3.11 on a 486 with only 4 MB RAM and starting swapping.
There are things that should just be more performant, even on low end hardware that is 10 years old.

[cybertraveler]

Actually for once Michael's grammar/spelling was right. "It" in this context is referring to Cairo. Possessive "it" doesn't use an apostrophe.

Am I correct in saying that you should use "it's" whenever "it is" also works at the same spot within the sentence?

Examples:

It's Wednesday. <-- right
It is Wednesday. <-- right

It's been too long since I last slept. <-- wrong
It is been too long since I last slept. <-- wrong
Its been too long since I last slept. <-- right

[DanL]

No. It's could also be "it has."

"It's been too long" is correct.
"Its been too long" is incorrect.

[schmidtbag]

Am I correct in saying that you should use "it's" whenever "it is" also works at the same spot within the sentence?

Yes, "it's" is a contraction, which always applies to "it is" or "it has". That being said:

It's been too long since I last slept. <-- wrong

This is actually correct, because the context suggests "It has been too long since I last slept".

I'm not 100% sure if contracting "it has" to "it's" is literally grammatically correct, but, people do use it that way regularly and it does make sense.

EDIT:
Just a tangent, but I always felt that possessive nouns should end in apostrophe-s, whereas the word "is" (and therefore contractions involving "is") should be spelled as "iz". Not only is "is" pronounced like "iz", but it would help effortlessly distinguish the difference between "it's" and "it'z". Buuuut nobody asked me.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

It's own test suite is no longer passing with interest in Cairo seeming to wane these days...

Wrong.

Its own test suite is no longer passing with interest in Cairo seeming to wane these days...

<= Correct.

What people are having issue with is Michael's own poor sentence structure after Its own test suite is no longer passing ... with interest...

It is not coherent.

``Development within Cairo itself seems to be waning these days. When building Cairo it no longer passes its own test suite.''