Rhyme the rhyme well

Jason, it’s not just the canvas: writing a simple 2D canvas is trivial — that’s why a lot of applications end up writing their own homegrown one.

The hard bits are the animation framework, the event handling and down to the integration with the existing platform. A generic canvas is hard, and you probably don’t want it to be developed inside gtk+ (not even for 3.0) — just like Cairo is not developed inside gtk+ but supersedes part of gtk+’s API.

As for 3D acceleration — I’m obviously biased here, so everyone should take what I write with a graintruckload of salt — but I maintain my view that if GNOME (and Linux) started heavily pushing towards more support for OpenGL, then we could get more market share ((think Compiz, and how many more users it brought home just with a spinning cube)), more visibility and thus more leverage to make the currently closed source drivers more open. Intel understood this; AMD is now getting it; I’m pretty sure nVidia will — or they will be simply pushed into irrelevance by the open drivers developed by the community ((unless you are a gamer, and need the very best card as soon as it’s out just to play Crisis)). Let’s face it: other platforms and toolkits are pushing heavily on hardware accelerated 3D effects.

Let’s start aggressively work to get the platform into the XXI century.

update@2008-10-11T12:21+0100 — just as a sidenote: if you have a good CPU, Mesa and software rendering, Clutter will work. It won’t be fast for some operations (like scaling and, possibly, rotating), but in that case you should probably start contributing to Mesa to make it fast (there’s a lot of room for improvement).