Hi, I was a bit surprised to see my name in the meeting minutes. I sometimes spend some spare time toying with 2d rendering on the gpu but it is really a side project and nothing like a serious one (Gecko keeps me busy enough that it's hard to find the will to hack on something else in my spare time).
If you guys ever have the resource to roll your own rasterizer, I would strongly suggest that you don't build an immediate mode api, and craft a more gpu-friendly scenegraph instead. To be honest I think that there is a lot of potential for improvement over what most browsers do today when it comes to rasterization. It's an interesting topic and I'd be happy to chat about it in Portland, and you guys should also talk with Bas and Cedric Bail if you haven't yet (Cedric doesn't work for Mozilla but he's got some interesting stuff to say about 2d scenegraphs, and was interested in getting in touch with the servo team about this). I could go on about that stuff for hours so I'll propose the people who are interested in this gather and chat informally about it over a beer in Portland maybe, if only to exchange a bit about our latest issues we've had in gecko. Sorry if this mail is a bit off topic, I just briefly skimmed through the meeting notes. Cheers, Nical On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 1:55 AM, Andreas Gal <andreas....@gmail.com> wrote: > Does anyone have profiling numbers that Azure on top of Skia has a > measurable performance overhead? > > Thanks, > > Andreas > > > On Nov 11, 2014, at 2:53 PM, Cameron Zwarich <zwar...@mozilla.com> > wrote: > > > > On Nov 11, 2014, at 1:19 PM, Patrick Walton <pcwal...@mozilla.com> > wrote: > >> > >> On 11/11/14 1:02 PM, Robert O'Callahan wrote: > >>> https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Workweek-rasterization > >>> > >>> We talked about writing our own rasterizer, which makes sense because > web > >>>> pages only render solid colored rectangles, image, and display text. > >>>> > >>> > >>> No. SVG, border-radius (rounded borders plus clipping to rounded > shapes), > >>> complex border styles, box-shadows and text-shadows are all commonly > used, > >>> and their performance matters. Plus you want to be able to rasterize > these > >>> precisely under arbitrary 2D affine transforms. > >> > >> I think that this was probably mistranscribed and/or missing context. I > wasn't in this meeting, but I would assume that this was talking about > Servo at an earlier stage of development, when people were thinking about > writing a rasterizer just to see what the performance would be. We have a > box-shadow PR and a work-in-progress border-radius implementation, after > all. > > > > Yes, it seems that there was something missing in the transcription. I > was making the point that writing a rasterizer is so tempting because the > features used by web content that Servo currently supports wouldn’t be too > difficult to implement. Other CSS features, Canvas, SVG, etc. mean that you > quickly need to support the full gamut. > > > >> Incidentally, I see no reason to move away from Azure, given how nice > Direct2D is on Windows. Nor do I think that it realistically makes sense to > write our own rasterizer, given that we have no reason to believe that > we'll do better than Direct2D/Skia-GL and the security track record of > Azure/Moz2D is, based on my analysis, much better than that of (for > example) layout or the DOM. As I said earlier, I wasn't in this meeting and > I do not think that we should make any architectural decisions as a result > of it. > > > > The point about moving away from Azure is that we pay a cost for using > Skia via Azure, but don’t get anything for it; none of the alternative > backends actually work. We have to import a lot of code outside of Azure > proper in order to make Azure work, and we had to add Skia-specific surface > handling support. As Martin commented, this adds a decent amount of > administrative overhead. As far as I can tell, the only reason to keep > doing this would be the hope that one of the non-Skia backends is useful to > us in the future. > > > > Cameron > > _______________________________________________ > > dev-servo mailing list > > dev-servo@lists.mozilla.org > > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-servo > > _______________________________________________ > dev-servo mailing list > dev-servo@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-servo > _______________________________________________ dev-servo mailing list dev-servo@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-servo
