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  • Also done by master incal and his faithful sidekick cognitive efti, some time ago, with industry standard methods: Elisp/C/SDL3/OpenGL/GLSL/GPU.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1rasjwf/elgpu/

    https://dataswamp.org/~incal/el-gpu/

    Big thread on devel as well also 'forgetting' to mention it eheh? Well, now then :)

    by efti
  • "That was the moment the architecture stopped being a promise and became a fact."

    The post is AI generated as well, right?

    by tomaskafka
  • I know this type of approach was rejected at the beginning, but you can also just ask CoreGraphics to use the GPU for 2D rendering (and I'm sure there are equivalent paths in e.g. Skia or Cairo).

    On macOS/iOS, the easiest way would probably be to set the drawsAsynchronously property on a CALayer. Then, all CoreGraphics operations on the context passed back to the layer via drawInContext: will be GPU accelerated.

    Lastly, there are some pretty sharp edges to this API, so definitely don't go flipping it on for every layer/view in your view hierarchy.

    by simscitizen
  • could've guessed staying away from xdisp.c was a good idea, cf. the "Buttery Smooth Emacs"[0] post:

    > Keep in mind that Emacs xdisp.c tries to support five different toolkits (including two different major versions of GTK) with #ifdefs. There is no runtime abstraction. We define three or four different versions of each damn function. It’s a nightmare.

    [0] https://gist.github.com/ghosty141/c93f21d6cd476417d4a9814eb7...

    by internet_points
  • Well done. Here’s hoping that a hand-written GPU backend gets developed based on this wonderful proof of concept. There’s no reason to not take advantage of the state of the art hardware when it’s available. And screens are only moving toward 4k and higher (6k or 8k).
    by drob518
  • Aside from the wonderful contribution to Emacs, I have the utmost respect for how straight-forward you were with the 100% LLM generated code. The enlightening conversation on GPU freedom that ensued was also informative.
    by arikrahman
  • https://github.com/tanrax/emacs-gpu/blob/main/.github/assets...

    This massive speed-up on 4K screens makes me want to try it. The wayland pgtk version has such terrible latency I have to use the X11 build to avoid gnashing teeth during my working hours. And I think it's the X11 version that uses cairo, so the actual speedup in my case might be even larger.

    I reported the issue years ago, the pgtk maintainer confirmed, say they can't do much as they're using GTK3 which isn't hardware accelerated, so I have to wait until they migrate to GTK4 (in a decade or so). A bit disappointing, but that's open source.

    Looks like I'm not the only one suffering with a 4K screen: https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/ucv0at/awful_perform...

    by sph
  • Emacs user for >32 years now. It's a pity this won't get merged. There is a big usability/accessibility factor to consider here: I really wish I could have something like the Ghostty cursor_blaze.glsl shader for highlighting where the cursor is when you switch windows/buffers/apps.

    Most people think GPU equals silly toys like video in a text window, but there is much more to it than that.

    [and yes, I know about beacon, which unfortunately doesn't work too well, as well as about pulse, which I use]

    by jwr

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