Performance gets a boost

In July our GSoC student and active contributor Krzysztof Kosiński made a significant step in making Inkscape more snappy for complex work. He merged code from his past and present Google Summer of Code projects.

The code from the 2010 project implements Cairo based rendering for shapes which makes rendering of flat and gradient fills up to twice as fast, and the second part of that project is threaded rendering of SVG Filters. The code from his 2011 project adds some smart caching to Inkscape. Now actual document's content is rendered separately from things like mouse pointer and selection cue.

We expect this work to be part of v0.49 which focuses on fixes and improvements rather than new features, but right now we are planning to roll out v0.48.2 — another bugfix release.