On 22 Feb, Jens Lautenbacher wrote:
> what remains in this case is that things like clear selection (on the
> bg layer) suddenly start to behave differently, depending if there's a
> layer above the background layer or not. Ick.
> I'd vote for always having an alpha layer. seems to be cleaner
> conceptually.
Always having an Alphachannel would allow us some nifty optimsations
in the GIMP. Although this takes more memory on some images (4 instead of 3
resp. 2 instead of 1 byte per pixel) the code would be much simpler,
many if's in the source which trash the branch prediction of any
processor would go away and the pixels would in most cases directly be
on cache boundary even speeding the thing more. And for real graphics
one needs an alphachannel anyways so what's the deal?
--
Servus,
Daniel
