What is XIL?

[SeungWook Choi]

What is XIL?
Would you like to explain XIL briefly?

--
최승욱/SeungWook CHoi
PACS Team, R&D Center, MEDISON CO., LTD.
PHONE: +82-2-264-2381-4 FAX: +82-2-264-2388
E-mail: swi...@medison.co.kr

[Himanshu Gohel]

XIL is Sun's Imaging Library for X. I think the newest version is 1.2
which ships with Solaris 2.4 (run-time libraries only - if you want
to develop using XIL and C/C++ you must buy the Solaris Software Developer's
Kit, which is about US$495, and includes XIL, XGL, AnswerBook, Motif etc.)

XIL provides routines callable by C/C++ that perform many common Image
Processing functions, such as convolution, filtering, FFT etc. It supports
compression standards such as JPEG and MPEG, and other standards such
as fax, PhotoCD etc, and has it's own Cell format too.

The advantage of XIL over X consortium's XIE (X Imaging Extension) is that
it is hardware aware on Suns. That is, if you have the SX chip on your
Sparc 10 or 20, you will see amazingly fast results. The disadvantage
is that only Sun uses XIL, so your software will not be portable. I believe
sun has plans to somehow integrate XIL with XIE, which be important if
it doesn't want to see XIL be a useless piece of software like XGL.
Another disadvantage is that there are NO PRINTED MANUALS available for XIL.
The only documentation you get is in the Answerbook format (atleast that's
what my Sun rep says)

Keep in mind that XIL is supported only on Solaris 2, not Solaris 1.

You can get Sun's white papers on their VISUAL packages (XIL, XGL etc),
and also XIL for further details.

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Himanshu Gohel, Go...@csee.usf.edu
Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling Research Group
U of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620