[Development] New repository request for an accelerated 2D drawing module

[Stan Morris]

Canvas is good. It works well for how QNanoPainter is used.

On Thu, Nov 6, 2025 at 06:03 Tuukka Turunen via Development <
development at qt-project.org> wrote:

> Since there was a question on names for the new item…
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> Canvas sounds good to me. It should be quite well understood and
> descriptive for this type of a component. Especially as it is very much
> like html canvas like Kaj said.
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> Yours,
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>                                 Tuukka
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> Confidential
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> *From: *Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> on behalf of Kaj
> Grönholm via Development <development at qt-project.org>
> *Date: *Wednesday, 5. November 2025 at 13.27
> *To: *development at qt-project.org <development at qt-project.org>
> *Subject: *Re: [Development] New repository request for an accelerated 2D
> drawing module
>
>
> > [I hope the hive mind here can find a better name for this than
> “Compact”, which I think is a rather subjective term that doesn’t say much.
> It’s faster - for certain use cases; it will have some API limitations
> compared to QPainter; it might or might not be smaller in terms of binary
> size and/or runtime footprint. It will grow over time, and then become less
> compact.
>
> > We don’t want to use QRhi* for this family of classes and types, because
> that’s a very low-level namespace.
>
> > One term that has been established for this kind of rendering is
> “Immediate”. While using that directly might be a bit too much of a nod
> towards ImGui (and generally the expectation that the framework doesn’t
> manage any state), a decent synonym for that is perhaps “Direct” (which is
> then again a bit close to Microsoft terminology…). Both indicate that the
> rendering bypasses (or doesn’t bother with) the scene graph data structures.
>
> ---
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm not set on "Compact", so it can be changed if we find more suitable
> naming scheme.
>
> "Immediate" would probably associate too much to immediate mode GUI
> pattern as you say. And this isn't exactly "direct" as there are APIs to
> paint into path or texture, which retain the painting data on GPU. Or maybe
> that's just my interpretation of the word direct.
>
> Compact here refers mostly to more compact API (compared to QPainter) and
> sets expectations: Prioritize simplicity and performance over features. If
> QC[ompact]Painter doesn't support feature X and we feel it would not fit
> well to a rather thin layer on top of QRhi, consider using "full" QPainter
> instead.
>
> One of my earlier thought was "Canvas", as the API follows closely HTML
> Canvas 2D Context specification, ported to Qt C++. As one of the future
> plans is to reimplement Quick Canvas element using this backend, could be
> logical for that to use "Qt Canvas Painter".
>
> But we could also use some fun / marketing name. Class names currently
> start with QC*, so if the name happens to start with C that may reduce the
> renaming needs but that's not a biggie ;-)
>
> Br,
>
> - Kaitsu -
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