A fast library for drawing in C

spuzzzzzzz · 09-17-2004, 05:27 AM

...preferably also threadsafe. I've been using gdk in a little project which involves drawing stuff and saving it to disk (I don't need to display the drawings). Gdk has become a huge bottleneck, however, and it also doesn't seem to be threadsafe (I had to mutex/lock the function that did the drawing, or it would crash with errors from gdk/xlib).

Can anyone recommend a good, fast library for drawing stuff? I need to be able to draw lines and polygons, and then I need to save a file (preferably in some compressed format). I'm happy to use libpng or something to compress the files, but if the library has a built-in function to do it, so much the better

EDIT: I've been looking at the enlightenment site and imlib2 looks pretty good. Does anyone have any experience with it?

huibert.alblas · 09-17-2004, 06:10 AM

HI,

imlib2 has come to my mind imediatly,
it has been in development in the enleightenment project for a couple of years.

E17 is based on it, it was one of the first libraries released for the project.

I don't know Rasterman that well, but I've heard he is an awsome (graphics-) programmer.

Imlib2 should be a dropin replacement for imlib,
it is _very_ fast.....

Loko into it, and loko through the e17 devel maillinglinsts.

kev82 · 09-17-2004, 06:14 AM

try gd

i have very limited experience with imlib2, just loading images of various formats and manipulating their data, i had no problems with it other than limited docs, but i think gd has more support for drawing primatives than imlib2 does.

spuzzzzzzz · 09-17-2004, 06:34 AM

I've had a quick look through the APIs for imlib2 and gd. They both have all the drawing primitives I need. Imlib looks very non-thread-safe, however, what with all those functions to set the active image, but that might not matter if its very fast...

Maybe I'll try them both and see which I like better. The code is pretty short, anyway. Thanks for the help.

spuzzzzzzz · 09-19-2004, 06:03 PM

OK, I've tried gd. I really like the API. It's very simple and easy to use. It also appears to be threadsafe (the docs don't mention it, but I've been using it in a fairly heavily threaded app and I haven't seen anything abnormal). It is, however, quite slow. So I don't think I'll be using it for this project, where speed is very important, but it might be useful in the future. Now to try out imlib...