| Mentor: |
Jeff Gonis |
| Second mentor: |
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| Level: |
Intermediate |
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Description
Squeak started life as a highly graphical environment for exploring and experimenting with computation. Part of it's appeal was that it was completely understandable from the ground up, including how every pixel on screen gets there. However, Squeak's graphical facilities have fallen behind the current state of the art, and are still largely focused fundamentally on manipulating bitmaps. Gezira offers a state of the art vector graphics framework that is at the same time compact and understandable. It is being actively developed by the people at VPRI and already has a smalltalk implementation courtesy of Bert Freudenberg which is available from the VPRI website.
Technical Details
Take Bert's work done for VPRI and integrate it into the current Squeak VM. On the image side, integrate Gezira into Squeak's canvas hierarchy and, time permitting, begin working to retrofit current morphic rendering to use Gezira. Work to speed up Gezira in smalltalk could also be a part of the project.
Benefits to the Student
The student will learn about vector graphics, as well as the Squeak VM. It will also provide valuable experience learning how VPRI is going about creating software that is both functional and compact at the same time.
Benefits to the Community
Squeak and Pharo will gain a modern, understandable vector graphics framework allowing for graphical capabilities that are of higher quality than what is currently available.
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