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Cairo 2D Graphics May Become Part of ISO C++

Posted by Soulskill on from the more-than-just-a-city-in-egypt dept.

An anonymous reader sends this news from Phoronix: "The C++ standards committee is looking at adopting a Cairo C++ interface as part of a future revision to the ISO C++ standard to provide 2D drawing. Herb Sutter, the chair of the ISO C++ standards committee, sent out a message to the Cairo developers this week about their pursuit to potentially standardize a basic 2D drawing library for ISO C++. The committee right now is looking at using a C++-ified version of Cairo. Sutter wrote, 'we are currently investigating the direction of proposing a mechanically C++-ified version of Cairo. Specifically, "mechanically C++-ified" means taking Cairo as-is and transforming it with a one-page list of mechanical changes such as turning _create functions into constructors, (mystruct*, int length) function parameters to vector<struct>& parameters, that sort of thing — the design and abstractions and functions are unchanged.'"

2 of 430 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That's unfortunate by Dahamma · · Score: 5, Funny

    Cairo is a great library, I've used it and found it very easy, but it's not remotely approaching a standards-quality design.

    Yeah, to make it C++ standards-quality they'll need to make it much less intuitive, add tons of templates to make it unreadable, and change the method names to something that makes much less sense...

  2. Re:But... why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, my question really is why they are doing this? I'm betting the answer is not one where they have actual usecases in mind.

    Firstly, I take issue with your premise that Cairo is no more than a toy and useless in actual work.

    Secondly, One very important usecase for a simple drawing library in the standard is to provide an easy route for novices to write cool, interactive and meaningful programs, without needing to write several hundred lines of scaffolding code and be well-versed in 6 different layers of abstraction from OSes to frameworks and graphics API.

    I don't know how other people learned programming, but in my case, the most engaging things I wrote all those years back in BASIC and Pascal (under DOS) were graphical programs in nature (extremely simple games, GUI-like apps that didn't really need the GUI, function plotting and other graphical toys, etc.) I'm guessing that I'm not unique in the fact that having access to simple, straightforward, inefficient, well-documented, built-in 2D graphics API led me to all sorts of cool experiences in programming and (majorly) determined my pursuit for the rest of the two decades since.

    Now, it is obvious that there will always be more novice programmers than experienced ones, so, I don't see the problem with the ISO C++ committee to explore standardizing such a library. Do you, really? Who is this going to hurt?! For most of us, this is pretty much out of our way, since we either write more serious graphical applications and need platform-specific, performance-oriented APIs that offer much more control and features, or we haven't written anything that needed a 2D immediate-mode graphics API in years. So, I ask the Slashdot readership again, what's wrong with standardizing a simple, straightforward 2D drawing API to help the novices and the occasional non-performance-sensitive drawing needs of the community?