Yes, I am treating RGB data. Specifically, I'm drawing the background PNGs for
KayudaMaps. Unfortunately, since this is run on a server, I don't have a GPU (though that can be remedied if it's determined that it's worth it).
The capability that this meter-of-beer is meant to give me is to overlay pictures with transparent bits on top of other pictures without having to use GL, ImageMagick, or Imager. It's not a rewrite of how any of those should do it - I'm just solving my specific problem in a very specialized manner. For example, since the images I'm working with don't have to be perfect, I've constrained my RGB values to 1-255, reserving 0 as transparent. The degradation is unnoticeable and I can handle transparent overlays without any speed penalties. This is also due to the fact that, for me, it's either fully transparent or fully opaque - another piece that specific to my problem that isn't generalizable to PNGs.
My criteria for good software:
- Does it work?
- Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?