[sldev] Question involving the rendering of interface windows

[Alissa Sanbre]

> the current code 
> re-renders everything every frame, traditional notions of region 
> invalidation* just don't exist in the codebase and would need to be 
> shoehorned in. That's work that would be necessary either for 
> efficiently rendering all UI to one texture, or individual window to 
> separate textures.

Moreover, because the current code assumes everything is redrawn every
frame, a UI window must _poll_ the information to be shown on it, in
many case.  I guess we need to introduce a set of interface to
"subscribe state changes" or "notify events to receivers", if we go to
that direction.

but, I believe the biggest problem is the amount of texture memory.
With just a small glyph caching, pango based text drawing runs in an
acceptable performance on modern CPU.  Those who can't stand the extra
overhead will have some older hardware, that has smaller main memory
and graphics memory.  I'm afraid that per-window texture buffer may
make things worse.

    Alissa Sabre
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