Handling clip as part of the surface state, as opposed to being part of
the operation state, is cumbersome and a hindrance to providing true proxy
surface support. For example, the clip must be copied from the surface
onto the fallback image, but this was forgotten causing undue hassle in
each backend. Another example is the contortion the meta surface
endures to ensure the clip is correctly recorded. By contrast passing the
clip along with the operation is quite simple and enables us to write
generic handlers for providing surface wrappers. (And in the future, we
should be able to write more esoteric wrappers, e.g. automatic 2x FSAA,
trivially.)
In brief, instead of the surface automatically applying the clip before
calling the backend, the backend can call into a generic helper to apply
clipping. For raster surfaces, clip regions are handled automatically as
part of the composite interface. For vector surfaces, a clip helper is
introduced to replay and callback into an intersect_clip_path() function
as necessary.
Whilst this is not primarily a performance related change (the change
should just move the computation of the clip from the moment it is applied
by the user to the moment it is required by the backend), it is important
to track any potential regression:
ppc:
Speedups
========
image-rgba evolution-20090607-0 1026085.22 0.18% -> 672972.07 0.77%: 1.52x speedup
▌
image-rgba evolution-20090618-0 680579.98 0.12% -> 573237.66 0.16%: 1.19x speedup
▎
image-rgba swfdec-fill-rate-4xaa-0 460296.92 0.36% -> 407464.63 0.42%: 1.13x speedup
▏
image-rgba swfdec-fill-rate-2xaa-0 128431.95 0.47% -> 115051.86 0.42%: 1.12x speedup
▏
Slowdowns
=========
image-rgba firefox-periodic-table-0 56837.61 0.78% -> 66055.17 3.20%: 1.09x slowdown
▏
Based on the work by Øyvind Kolås and Pierre Tardy -- many thanks to
Pierre for pushing this backend for inclusion as well as testing and
reviewing my initial patch. And many more thanks to pippin for writing the
backend in the first place!
Hacked and chopped by myself into a suitable basis for a backend. Quite a
few issues remain open, but would seem to be ready for testing on suitable
hardware.
The meta-surface is a vital tool to record a trace of drawing commands
in-memory. As such it is used throughout cairo.
The value of such a surface is immediately obvious and should be
applicable for many applications. The first such case is by
cairo-test-trace which wants to record the entire graph of drawing commands
that affect a surface in the event of a failure.
With the addition of cairo_show_text_glyphs() came a couple of functions
to query whether the target supported the extended attributes. However,
at Carl's request cairo_has_show_text_glyphs() was removed - but the
documentation was not updated to reflect that.
Note 1.7 API changes: Remove lcd_filter, cairo_has_show_glyphs, and
add cairo_text_cluster_flags_t. Also mention a few major bug fixes,
Behdad's build-system rework, and Chris's customary robustness
improvements.
