Is GDI+ just a layer on top of GDI, or something new?

Question

When GDI+ came out, I remember all the brouhaha about how it was the \"new, faster, better\" way to display stuff in Windows. But everytime I looked at it, it seemed to me that

Answer 1

GDI+ is not COM. GDI+ has an underlying "flat" API that is callable from C (or any other language, therefore), and an object-oriented wrapper in C++ that just calls the flat API. There are also wrappers in .NET (System.Drawing) and Delphi that also just call the flat API. It works completely different from GDI in that you don't set objects (pens, brushes, fonts) to a device context, but rather pass them to drawing functions. It does not have much in common with GDI. I don't know though if the implementation of GDI+ uses GDI - but it likely doesn't, because it has so many features that are just not available in GDI.

Unfortunately, it is slower than GDI. It's very powerful though.

As decasteljau pointed out in the meantime, the performance issues might come from the fact that it is not rendered in hardware, unlike OpenVG or WPF. I recently used XNA because of that for a graphical realtime application.