Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

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> What does “surface” mean here? It’s not explained or even used once in the article body.

Yeah, seems like a poor choice of title without the explanation.

For rendering implementations, "surface" usually refers to a part of memory being rendered into as output or that something else has rendered into that is being used as input, like an image buffer that webcam output is dumped into. One example set of docs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3d9/dir...

I don't know if I've ever really thought about the name. I guess maybe at some point it was more straightforward and a surface was just a part of memory that was going to be blitted directly to screen and so in that sense you're painting a "surface" of that area of the screen? I'd be interested if anyone knows a more detailed etymology.

Good point. I don't think anybody gave much thought to the title after I came up with it - I suspect it is easy to gloss over during the edit passes.

I chose the title so long ago that I can't really remember what I was thinking.

It seems like you were trying to reference 'Don't Copy That Floppy'

"Canvas" was already taken at the time these APIs were becoming popular.

typically terminology-wise I see "canvas" used to refer to a surface targeted by paint operations, vs other surfaces which may be read-only (contain an image you loaded from disk or a snapshot of a canvas at a previous point in time).

In D3D terminology I think it's almost always been "surfaces" and "render targets", where the latter is something you can paint into. Surfaces are often broken down into levels, and don't necessarily contain image data (they can contain depth/stencil data for 3D rendering, for example)

Yes. In the pre-DirectX games SDK for Windows 95 it was a mix of “surface” and DIB (eg CreateCompatibleDIB). The win32 API was already using “canvas” in many places. Surface actually shows up in OS/2 Presentation Manager as well.

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