Re: [matplotlib-devel] master macosx backend broken?

[Michiel de H. <mjl...@ya...>]

Hi all,

At the time when the Mac OS X backend was first introduced, its performance was significantly better than other backends, but this was due to the way its event loop is organized. Nowadays the other backends use the same event loop organization, and as far as I know currently there is no significant performance difference between Agg and macosx.
So now the only advantage of the Mac OS X backend is that it does not depend on 3rd-party libraries, and therefore is a reliable backend when Apple releases a new version of Mac OS X, whereas other backends may have to wait for updates to the 3rd-party libraries.


Best,
-Michiel.




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I think an objective comparison of features and performance between Agg and macosx would be a helpful place to start the discussion, just so we know what we're talking about here.  I seem to recall one of Michiel de Hoon's original motivations was performance, perhaps related to hardware rendering, but I haven't seen any solid numbers on that, and I didn't have a Mac at the time.