Mathieu Bouchard <matju / sympatico.ca> writes:

> On Wed, 16 May 2001, Steve Tuckner wrote:
> > Would it be a good idea to develop a pure Ruby GUI framework built on top of
> > a basic bitblt capability that would be portable across many operating
> > systems (ala smalltalk's GUI or Java Swing). Would such a GUI be fast
> > enough? Is it worth doing?
> 
> I'd be ready to do that on top of Xlib, and actually cooperating with
> Xlib. I think the GUI would be fast enough in that case. If OTOH the GUI
> tries to do all by itself and then sends only a bunch of Pixmaps to X11,
> then you get a whole lot of slowness.

Take a look at Squeak (www.squeak.org). It's a Smalltalk environment that
uses bitblt for all its drawing. It works on MacOS, Linux, Windows, iPAQ,
and many more platforms. Decent 3D rendering speeds, too.

Jim
-- 
Jim Menard, jimm / io.com, http://www.io.com/~jimm/
"Specifying an object, sending it a message, and getting back another
object as the result are the only things that ever happen in Smalltalk
code." -- Ted Kaehler/ Dave Patterson, A Taste of Smalltalk