[webkit-dev] WebKit GPU rendering possibility

[Michael Catanzaro]

On Fri, 2016-11-04 at 08:23 +0100, Carlos Garcia Campos wrote:
> What I can say as the GTK+ port maintainer is that we are very
> interested in this. We are actually looking for a cairo replacement,
> because unfortunately cairo is nowadays pretty much unmaintained. So,
> if FastUIDraw can be used by the GTK+ port to replace cairo, and the
> performance improvement is so impressive we would definitely switch.

Yes, to be clear, Carlos is representing the WebKitGTK+ development
team here. Since WebKitGTK+ is the currently primary WebKit port used
by Linux distros [1], that means this work would have the potential to
be widely-deployed on Linux desktops worldwide. Maybe that will help
you in your quest for funding. Of course, we can't say whether we would
actually switch to this implementation before the code actually exists,
but we're definitely interested.

Other ports may not be as interested, as different WebKit ports have
very different graphics architectures. For instance, the Apple ports of
course don't run on Linux at all. But if you can demonstrate a
significant performance improvement in WebKitGTK+, then other ports
might take more notice.

I should mention, though, that we require support for hardware that
only supports OpenGL ES 2.0. If FastUIDraw can't handle this, then we
would need to keep a fallback codepath that uses Cairo, which would be
unfortunate.

Michael

[1] Sorry Konstantin ;)