From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <11d3735baba19e7c2a9a059159f39460@vitanuova.com>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] point2rgb and point2rgba
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 19:19:53 +0000
From: rog@vitanuova.com
In-Reply-To: <ee9e417a0501311057a027ecb@mail.gmail.com>
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> if you express what you want to do in terms 
> of real draw operations instead of loadimage 
> and unloadimage, then you will be much happier.
> xscreensaver is slow because you are not using
> the system the way it was intended to be used.

but the real draw operations are a fairly arbitrary set.  i'd hazard
that most of the xscreensaver graphics output could not be nicely
expressed in terms of real draw operations.

didn't an earlier version of the draw device rely entirely on pushing
bitmaps?  from that perspective, the current draw device is just a
bandwidth optimisation for commonly found graphics operations.

there are applications that really do need to push lots of
custom-generated pixels of data to the screen.  it seems a pity that
this kind of thing is so heavily penalised in plan 9.  maybe it's just
that so many of these kind of applications are basically frivolous
(screensavers and games)...