[Cuis-dev] Adding Single Font / Morphic Update

[Juan Vuletich]

Hi Phil,

On 1/24/2020 4:48 PM, Phil B wrote:
> Juan,
>
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 2:15 PM Juan Vuletich via Cuis-dev 
> <cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st <mailto:cuis-dev at lists.cuis.st>> wrote:
>
>     The high performance OpenCL implementation of the VectorGraphics
>     engine
>     is in the works. As I usually say at this time of the year, maybe
>     this
>     is the year it will become usable enough to completely replace
>     BitBltCanvas and BitBltCanvasEngine... You can see the commits that
>     affect VectorGraphics.pck.st <http://VectorGraphics.pck.st> in
>     GitHub, and see that I'm actually
>     working on it.
>
>
> By 'completely replace' I hope you mean 'become the default, but still 
> be able to live alongside'.

Maybe not even that. By 'completely replace' I mean stop using 
BitBltCanvas and Engine in your image / application if you choose to 
switch to the VectorCanvas and Engine.

Ideally, the kernel image should be headless. Morphic should be an 
installable package, requiring some pair of Canvas+Engine. It might be 
BitBlt, Vector, OpenGL, Cairo or any other graphics backend we might 
build. And maybe we can build a ST-80 style MVC as an alternative to 
Morphic. People really wanting alternatives like web-based GUIs, or 
native widgets should be able to build the appropriate libraries and not 
be forced to have Morphic present if that's what they want.

Still, the default image might be BitBlt based... That's stuff we need 
to discuss. It would be great to build the images we use (that include 
dev tools) based on smaller ones. Or even a full bootstrap from sources.

> One of the things I've been hoping we end up with is a more (wait for 
> it...) modular drawing system.  It would be great to be able to switch 
> between graphics systems and/or have a worlds-like environment where 
> the top level could be one drawing system and one of the children 
> another.

Yep. Exactly.

> Just think how much easier your new Morphic would have been to develop 
> (and would be to debug/enhance going forward) if you had that as a 
> starting point.

Well, that's actually sort of what I did. I renamed the existing 
hierarchy as OldXXXMorph, built the new one, switched to it, and deleted 
the old one. This was a looong time ago!

> And then there are the low power/low capability devices that don't 
> even have full JIT support yet, let alone OpenCL capable hardware. 
> (lots of ARM stuff and some old/low-end PCs fall into this category)

Of course. Although I'd love to be able to assume OpenCL is present (not 
just for the graphics engine, but also for FloatArray and other numerics 
and signal processing stuff), I know this is not the case.

>     Cheers,
>
>     -- 
>     Juan Vuletich
>
>
> Thanks,
> Phil

Thanks,

-- 
Juan Vuletich
www.cuis-smalltalk.org
https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev
https://github.com/jvuletich
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-vuletich-75611b3
@JuanVuletich

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