[DEV] The Blend2D library partially runs on ppc64le.

[DKnoto]

I've been playing with the Blend2D library for a while now. It is a high performance 2D vector
graphics engine written in C++ and released under the Zlib license https://blend2d.com/.
On the x86_64 platform everything compiles and works quite well but on ppc64le it is no
longer so ideal.

What works:

• single-threaded mode without boosters;
• multi-threaded mode without boosters but in a limited way.

What doesn't work:

• SIMD operation support;
• asmJit compiler tool to generate JIT code https://github.com/asmjit/asmjit;
• multithreading support under heavy load.

I tested this on my Talos II with POWER9/18c. I downloaded the sources for the library
https://github.com/blend2d/blend2d and the bl_bench test program https://github.com/blend2d/blend2d-bench.
After downloading the library code and bl_bench, I compiled this program with the following
command:

Code: [Select]

build]$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DBLEND2D_DIR=../../Source/ -DBLEND2D_NO_JIT=TRUE -DBLEND2D_NO_STDCXX=false

In single-threaded mode everything works correctly but in for multi-threaded mode you should
run bl_bench with the parameter --quantity=N where N = <1, 15>. For N=16 it sometimes crashes
and for N=17+ it crashes always.

By default multithreaded mode works for 2T and 4T, to add more threads I added the following
piece of code to bl_bench/src/app.cpp in line 359:

Code: [Select]

    {
      Blend2DModule mod(8);
      runModule(mod, params);
    }

    {
      Blend2DModule mod(16);
      runModule(mod, params);
    }

After these modifications, I obtained the following results:

• bl_bench-gcc-Release-quantity-1000.txt: results for single-threaded mode with default parameters;
• bl_bench-gcc-Release-quantity-16.txt: results for single- and multi-threaded mode with quantity = 16;

I'm also attaching screenshots showing the performance of selected modes, images can be obtained from
the library's website after entering your own performance measurements using bl_bench.

The conclusion of an incorrigible dreamer:

Haiku on x86 uses the AGG engine and its UI is incredibly responsive, if on ppc64le one had such a Blend2D-based
UI then there would be no complaints about the graphical performance of Gnome or KDE ;-)

[DKnoto]

To illustrate the performance differences between Qt and Blend2D, I include four
more screenshots from one of the test applications included with the library: