All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Imager API

tonyc on 2006-01-18T06:31:53

Over Christmas I made most of Imager's API, such as it is, available to external modules.

This has 2 purposes:

  • you can write XS modules that access Imager at the C level for speed. eg. the mandel dynfilt module that has been supplied with Imager for years, is now a perl/XS module installed as part of Imager.
  • you can write C level image or fill objects for Imager. eg. I have Imager::SDL in SVN at the moment, which renders whatever you draw to a SDL surface.

I added a hook for Inline::C as well, which makes the API very easy to use, assuming C doesn't scare you too much.

Of course, none of this is released yet, but what's there hangs together.

Currently some of the API isn't exposed - file access, because it's not an image manipulation function, and fonts, because the C level font API is fairly chaotic.

Imager's release cycle has tended to be pretty long, but hopefully I'll get this out in the next few weeks.

Right now I'm going through the file handlers and checking they report errors correctly - in some cases the C level handlers do, but the perl level code is discarding the error <sigh>

Sounds Great

samtregar on 2006-01-18T18:31:02

This sounds great. I'm looking forward to the release!

-sam