[whatwg] Canvas pixel manipulation and performance

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 11/29/09 11:22 PM, Oliver Hunt wrote:
 > The CanvasPixelArray implementation in WebKit has always matched the 
 > spec and been a clamping bytearray, eg. one byte per channel, per
 > pixel.

I assume you mean "the spec as it is now" and not "the spec as it was 
when Gecko implemented get/putImageData"?  The latter was quite 
different, as I recall.

> Just for future reference for all who are interested: in WebKit the JS interface to a DOM object is merely a binding to a C++ implementation

Sure; the point is that in Gecko the thing returned by 
getImageData().data is not a DOM object at all but a JS Array. 
Similarly, the object returned by getImageData() is not a DOM object, 
but a JS Object.  Likewise, putImageData accepts any JS Object with the 
right properties on it (width, height, and data).

I _think_ as of when the implementation was created some of this (e.g. 
the putImageData behavior) was called for by the then-whatwg spec.  See 
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/2007-10-26/ for example; I believe 
there were other drafts between the 2005-01 draft and that one that had 
still other behavior.

As you note the spec has since changed; the Gecko implementation hasn't 
been changed yet pending us having some indication that the spec is 
actually stable now.  Once burnt, twice shy and all.

In any case, I simply didn't know whether CanvasPixelArray was 
implemented as a host object or a native object in webkit, and didn't 
want to make any claims about it as a result.

-Boris