[gs-devel] beginpage and the vector device

[Ken Sharp]

At 09:35 02/11/2007 -0700, Ray Johnston wrote:

>One efficient method for a device to catch the first marking
>operation is to hook all of the device marking procedures to
>one set of routines that signals 'page has been marked', then
>after performing the start of page stuff, set all of the
>procedures to the regular procs. This avoids performance penalty
>once the page is marked.

Not a criticism, but this is similar 'black magic' to having the stream 
accessor do the work, isn't it ? Though much cleaner, its still not 
entirely intuitively obvious. Makes debugging potentially awkward, because 
you might have to put breakpoints in two different routines. Or, like 
Ralph, spend time scrathing your head wondering why your breakpoint doesn't 
trigger :-)

It certainly avoids the performance penalty (minor though it probably is), 
but it is still slightly obscure.

Maybe we should recommend this for new development ? I don't fancy the task 
of altering all the existing code....



                         Ken

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