Rendering Engine as standalone library

[abligh]

On similar hardware, does using C reduce the rendering performance of Xara relative to assembly?

Yes. The hand coded assembler will always be faster than C compiler output. Equally, choice of C compiler makes a difference. Sadly, MSVC seems to do a better job than gcc. We hope the gcc people will be interested in doing some optimization here.

Alex

[Xhris]

Yes. The hand coded assembler will always be faster than C compiler output. Equally, choice of C compiler makes a difference. Sadly, MSVC seems to do a better job than gcc. We hope the gcc people will be interested in doing some optimization here.

Alex

When Xara LX is complete, will LX C become the standard over windows assembly when upgraded in the future? Or will both exist simultaneously? If cross platforming means that even the windows version will become a C port of the LX version, does this mean that the successor to Xtreme will see a reduction in performance?

[abligh]

When Xara LX is complete, will LX C become the standard over windows assembly when upgraded in the future? Or will both exist simultaneously? If cross platforming means that even the windows version will become a C port of the LX version, does this mean that the successor to Xtreme will see a reduction in performance?

Well I can't speak for Xara, but one assumes they would like to keep their current income stream, and making things run slower sounds like shooting themselves in the foot...

Note it's (pretty much) only the drawing library which is in optimized assembler on the Windows version, not the whole program.

Alex

[accessD]

Xhris, don't worry - assembler could be portable too
Both Windows and Linux are running on Intel. Assembler (generally) is the same.
Moreover even Macs are now running on Intel. So, what's problem?