Re: Programming graphic systems

[Martin <martin.dowie@btopenworld.com>]

On Apr 23, 10:27 am, Olivier Scalbert <olivier.scalb...@algosyn.com>
wrote:
> Hello,
>
> When playing with my GPS, I was thinking of the beautiful graphic
> systems used in safety critical environment (medical, aircraft, ATC, ...).
> I assume lots of them must be written in Ada. I was asking myself how
> are they programmed mainly at the graphic level. Does the application
> part use a graphic toolkit provided by the graphic board manufacturer or
> do you have to program all the graphic primitives yourself in Ada (as
> Bresenham line algorithm, ...) and written to the raster memory (which
> must be very cool!) ?
>
> Thanks for your info,
>
> Olivier


For aircraft, you usually have an OpenGL API to the graphics card,
though I'm not aware of any 'safety critical' display systems, Do-178B/
Level C is fairly typical. I'm sure there must be Level A/B display
systems...

In older systems, you might have a cursive display and primitives
provided by your (often) bespoke hardware (e.g. move, draw_to, fill,
etc). You then create 'scripts' to draw what you need.

Cheers
-- Martin