Re: Platform independent graphical display for Emacs

[Po Lu]

Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:

> Yes, because having a single, modern, sane, popular cross-platform
> graphics library (let's say Skia, for instance) would make things much
> worse than the current status-quo, with N entangled backends requiring
> the participation of multiple experts every time a new feature is
> implemented :-/

No "cross-platform graphics library" is either truly cross-platform or
acceptable for our purposes.

Skia itself is simply a no-goer.  That abomination is impossible to
build outside the context of Chromium (or some other Google-endorsed
program).  Their API is also unstable and changes rapidly.

On the other hand, the current status quo seems to work: I can't really
think of an instance where the people interested in a port to a
different platform didn't spend the small effort required to implement a
new feature in Emacs to that platform.

And that effort is usually minor.  It took me about 15 minutes to add
tab bar support to the NS port, for example, and that was without any
prior experience in both the NS port code and Cocoa in general.

> 3. New graphical capabilities that will make possible new high-level
>    features.

> I don't know why you keep ignoring point 3, which is the most important,
> and reduce the proposal to "oh, someone wants to add one more graphical
> backend."

Please explain in detail what the new graphical capabilities are, and
how using a different graphics library will help.