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GTK+ to Use Cairo Vector Engine
Eugenia writes "GTK+ is now the first major toolkit to have added support for the Cairo 2D vector graphics library, which is designed to provide high-quality display and print output. GTK+ project leader Owen Taylor has commented on the X/GTK integration of Cairo. To put it in perspective, Cairo is similar to OSX's Quartz engine and Longhorn's Avalon (PPT analysis). The 3D hardware accelerated image compositing OpenGL part of Cairo will be provided by the Glitz library. Cairo is 'possible' to be part of Qt 4.x at a later date, according to Trolltech's Qt 4 technical preview document."
Quartz handles vectors just fine: it's all PDF underneath which handles vectors just fine. Cocoa provides a number of classes to create and draw vectors images (ie: NSBezierPath).
The Aqua interface elements (brushed metal, gel buttons, title bars, wtc) are bitmaps but that's not a limitation of quartz.
Of course everything you see on the screen is eventually rasterized before being displayed - but that's a requirement for any display thats out puting to a CRT, LCD, etc.
Have a browse around Direct Rendering Open Source Project for details of video cards with open source 3D drivers.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Actually, mono is currently using cairo a lot. In fact, their new Windows.Forms is switching to a native implementation. System.Drawing uses cairo. This implies gtk# as well. :D
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NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP didn't use vector graphics for a lot of the most commonly seen graphics. The buttons on windows, the application icons, and the buttons in various programs were all bitmaps.
Some programs exploited Display Postscript more than others, but on the whole, I'd expect to see a lot more vector graphics use in a typical free software OS in the next few years than I saw with NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. I was never much of a PS hacker, but I understand that PS can do a lot more than graphics work.
I own a NeXT cube system (currently in my attic, unused) which I used to use regularly from NeXTSTEP 2.1 through NeXTSTEP 3.2.
Digital Citizen
What's your definition of "out"? From the Cairo download page, "Cairo is still under active development. The API is rapidly approaching stability, but is not quite there yet, so there is not yet any official "release" of cairo." So, Cairo is not a 1.0 release, or even a .01 release. Dev snapshots are available, in an unstable form (the API is "approaching" stability). How does this differ from the available technology preview of Avalon (aside from the openness of the source, of course)?
Both are still in pre-release stages. Both are available in a publicly-consumable form even though they've not reached API stability yet. Declaring one or the other the "winner" is still premature.
Oh, yeah, and Avalon will be available on XP and 2k3, not just Longhorn.
I believe that the point the grandparent was trying to make was that Quartz buffers the rasterised image, not the vector source. This means that when you invoke something like Exposé which resizes a window without redrawing it you are scaling a bitmap, rather than a vector image. This is done for performance reasons (most graphics cards - even quite old ones - can handle scaling a bitmap quickly. Scaling and rendering vector images is more computationally expensive), although the trade-off is a slight loss in quality. I suspect that Apple will ship an updated backend to Quartz (as they did with Quartz Extreme) which buffers the vector data once they believe that enough of their install base has fast enough graphics cards to make it worthwhile.
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Mesa-standalone is a GL layer that doesn't run through X.
XGL is an X server where everything displayed on screen is accelerated.
Cairo makes toolkit graphics vector.
Then it's all done, we'll party with hookers and coke while some guy from Sun complains loadly about daniels removing xeyes from the so called 'modular' tree...