What's the best multiplatform way to draw tons of characters/sprites on screen?

General JUCE discussion
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Is there a fast way to draw tons of small bitmaps with JUCE? I’m writing a music tracker application and started thinking what’s the best way to draw all the note and parameter data on screen? My first reaction was to use OpenGL but since Apple is dropping OpenGL support completely AND I’d like to support Mac/PC/Linux, OpenGL isn’t a viable option as such.

In a perfect world I’d like to do this:

  1. Have a buffer of 175x32 characters which will be drawn on screen.
  2. Have a buffer of 175x32 values which define colors of the characters.
  3. Have a buffer of 175x32 values which define background colors of the characters.

Basically something like point sprites drawn with three input buffers: charcter + color + background color. That would do the trick perfectly. But this gets nasty when trying to support multiple operating systems.

Any idea what’s the best way to go around this? Is there some ready made feature in JUCE which would help me with this? Is it possible to have this kind of accelerator feature request for upcoming JUCE versions? (point sprite buffers or such)