The request is a bit unreasonable for the current team size.
Just to reiterate: the request is a general one to focus on making modern vector-based designs easier to implement in JUCE. The items are example areas which need improvement to achieve this goal.
Think this through. What’s really necessary to achieve this?
I’ve given this a lot of thought (and hundreds of hours of work). I have layered shadows, background blurs and thousands of line-segments animating at 60fps-ish (it’ll get better with the hardware sync coming in 7.x) in my app using vanilla JUCE (not opengl, etc). It took a lot of effort to get things to work nicely and I still have some windows work to do. But if I can personally accomplish this, I feel confident the JUCE team can do even better at reaching these goals.
Let’s stay realistic and solve it bottom up. First and foremost improving and EXTENDING the existing graphics backend
I think we’re ultimately in agreement! I feel it’s a valid and pragmatic approach to work incrementally towards improving these things. An example would be the Stack Blur implementation which is massive improvement over the existing one. No, it’s not GPU, it doesn’t really have to be, it’s usable and CPUs are very fast these days. With a little work, things like drop-shadows are just as easily cacheable as any JUCE component.
The first step for this is to solve the OpenGL Apple deprecation issue. How to approach this?
The JUCE team knows best what low level implementation scope makes sense for them to build and support. As a plugin dev, I only know that I want to work my designer in vector graphics programs and be able to have those translate reasonably in JUCE. I’ve personally accomplished this without compromise so far, so I believe it’s a reasonable ask, regardless of implementation detail.