One of the major requests by OpenGL users has been the ability to
specify settings when creating a GL context, like the version to use
or whether the debug support should be enabled.
We have a couple of requirements in terms of API:
• avoid, if at all possible, the "C arrays of integers with
attribute, value pairs", which are hard to write and hard
to bind in non-C languages.
• allow failing in a recoverable way.
• do not make the GL context creation API a mess of arguments.
Looking at prior art, it seems that a common pattern is to split the
construction phase in two:
• a first phase that creates a GL context wrapper object and
does preliminary checks on the environment.
• a second phase that creates the backend-specific GL object.
We adopted a similar pattern:
• gdk_window_create_gl_context() creates a GdkGLContext
• gdk_gl_context_realize() creates the underlying resources
Calling gdk_gl_context_make_current() also realizes the context, so
simple GL users do not need to care. Advanced users will want to
call gdk_window_create_gl_context(), set up the optional requirements,
and then call gdk_gl_context_realize(). If either of these two steps
fails, it's possible to recover by changing the requirements, or simply
creating a new GdkGLContext instance.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=741946
We need to use this in the code path where we make the context
non-current during destroy, because at that point the window
could be destroyed and gdk_window_get_display() would return
NULL.
This is not really needed. The gl context is totally tied to the
window it is created from by virtue of sharing the context with the
paint context of that window and that context always has the visual
of the window (which we already can get).
Also, all user visible contexts are essentially offscreen contexts, so
a visual doesn't make sense for them. They only use FBOs which have
whatever format that the users sets up.
To properly support multithreaded use we use a global GPrivate
to track the current context. Since we also don't need to track
the current context on the display we move gdk_display_destroy_gl_context
to GdkGLContext::discard.
Its not really reasonable to handle failures to make_current, it
basically only happens if you pass invalid arguments to it, and
thats not something we trap on similar things on the X drawing side.
If GL is not supported that should be handled by the context creation
failing, and anything going wrong after that is essentially a critical
(or an async X error).
We make user facing gl contexts not attached to a surface if possible,
or attached to dummy surfaces. This means nothing can accidentally
read/write to the toplevel back buffer.
