Future in the Past: designing and implementing the GTK scene graph

Emmanuele Bassi

up until now, GTK worked fine without an explicit scene graph. though that's not saying much: after all, GTK worked fine in a world that was designed and developed mostly around the 90s.

why does GTK need a scene graph? what do we gain, and what do we lose, by adding this functionality? more importantly, how can we implement something and not make it hopelessly outdated right after a release cycle?

after working for the past 6 years on Clutter, Emmanuele has some idea about implementing a scene graph and an animation framework inside the GNOME platform, and would like to share those ideas with the GNOME developer community.