[webkit-dev] Canvas color CSS parsing performance

[Dean McNamee]

I've been working on some canvas code that is an animation doing many
fills of different colors.  I've spent some time profiling my code,
and the majority of time (over 8%) spent in WebKit is in the CSS
parser.  The current canvas spec only allows you to set colors as a
string that goes through the CSS parser "rgb(1, 2, 3)", etc, or as a
gradient.  The gradient color points are also CSS color strings, so
creating gradients also requires going through the parser.

Does anyone have thoughts on allowing fillStyle / strokeStyle (and
probably the gradient color points also) to take an array of RGB /
RGBA?  This would allow for much more efficient color setup, and would
be a very trivial change to the current DOM binding code.  I can
submit a bug and patch to make the sfx / v8 DOM binding changes, but
since it's something standardsy, I wanted to make sure to put it out
there and solicit opinions.

I think it's a pretty big weakness now that the only way you can set
colors has to go through such a heavy parsing path.

Thanks