Jeff Garland wrote:
I think there would be interest
agree
and I believe there are solutions to the problems you raise. For example, you could integrate the chart lib so that it could use several different graphics packages that would be external to boost
In general I do agree, however it should be recognized that there is a certain potential for a primitive graphics library in Boost. It would be better if the higher level library proposed by the OP could be based on such a standard grapichs API.
(iostreams, for example, can use various compression libs for compressing data).
Compresion library APIs are probably very different from graphic libraries with regard to the size of the API. A good example of the opposite approach is Boost.Threads. I strongly believe projects like the one proposed here will be a lot more attractive to write and maintain if we had a good and portable graphics library under Boost or the C++ standard. Alternatively an existing portable library could be used, but this add dependencies to other libraries that typically are not part of the target platforms and there are most likely issues with licences to most of these. The need for graphics primitive API was discussed as one of the first issues that had to be addressed when proposal for GUI library was discussed earlier on this list. Is there any work ongoing on this? It seems like this has stalled, I think this is a sign that the task of writing higher level graphics based libraries becomes overvelming in Boost since a single source of portable graphics foundation is not available. We have many good alternatives, but none of these meet all requirements as I see it, so the best we have is to advice developers to integrate to more than one graphics package. Not good for Boost nor for C++ in general. One thing C++ really need is something that is standard, is available and is free which in spirit provides for Standard C++ what Java2D and possibly Java3D provides for Java. A good source of inspiration is http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-arthur.html . I would consider to help out with such an effort if somebody else took the lead, but I have limited time I can set aside for such work. ---- Bjørn Roald