Re: Emacs and Gnome Canvas

[Stefan Monnier]

>>> I'm more interested on a simpler approach: here is the data, display
>>> it.
>> This isn't Emacs.  You are describing Gnuplot.  The most important
>> problem a display engine needs to solve is: here's the new data and
>> the old display, now update the display.  And the data is not all
>> given in one place.
> That's implicit in the above. The "data" contains info about what
> changed.

I think this will be the hard part: Emacs doesn't keep track very
precisely of which data it changes.  It might keep track of which
windows/buffers were affected, as well as maybe a containing region, but
that's about it.  It "often" (not that often, but often enough that it
should be handled passably fast) ends up saying "just redisplay it all"
because the changes have too far-reaching consequences to keep track
of them.
If it can be made to work, then it's an interesting direction, because
it basically dumps the responsibility of handling redisplay to some
external library.  I don't think trying to handle all the current
display features makes sense as a starting goal, BTW.  Better start
small and add features one by one as you encounter them.  You'll want to
rewrite the code at some point anyway, so there's no need to spend too
much time designing upfront.


        Stefan