[Moonlight-list] Moonlight as a primary Mono GUI (+ about rendering engine)

[Kosenko Max]

Cairo already has some sort of hardware support. There were already several
tries to use it in Moonlight - but they ended up with resumes that Cairo
requires deep changes. I don't see Moonlight trying to really use it.
Benefit of managed rendering engine is significant in my opinion. 

I'm not talking about throwing development of Moonlight and start making
port. It's important to do ML3 and make it pass all those BCL and SL
unit-tests. But I think that in case Moonlight would be treated not just
Linux SL that can help find more forces to Moonlight team. And having more
managed and simple parts in ML makes development cycle simpler imho.

I don't know why do you think Cairo+OpenGL better option. Have you checked
out sources of Cairo+Glitz? That's not several lines code change to make it
really work. Cairo is large, purpose of it was different and it's unmanaged
(and that also takes additional effort).

My question came up from Moonlight Notes where someone discussed pro and
contras of AGG vs Cairo. 
Well - I've proposed to look on AGG Sharp. It's actually changes those
pro/contra a lot. It's not complete, but it's much simpler than any other
options. So it's achievable to finish it up. 


I just want to ask Moonlight team - those who extensively used Cairo - what
do you think about AGG Sharp? And second question is to Mono community -
wouldn't it be great to target Moonlight as a Mono WPF also?


Best Regards. Max.

Stephen A. wrote:
> 
> Lion defines a USE_OPENGL flag, but agg3d doesn't use any hardware
> acceleration! Rather than calling into Tao.OpenGl, it actually implements
> a tiny part of the OpenGL API in C#.
> 
> In any case, a Moonlight developer would be better suited to say if a port
> to AGG is possible. My uneducated opinion is that a cairo-opengl renderer
> would be a more achievable goal. Don't misunderstand me, I think AGG is a
> pretty neat library (I've been keeping an eye on it ever since I found out
> about AGG#), but I rather doubt a Moonlight rewrite is in the plans -
> especially considering that Silverlight 3 is already out!
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