Didn't figure I could get to sleep this evening, so did some playing with the Cairo-backed turtle graphics. Got quite a few little nits worked out, but the big performance bottleneck still remains, namely we still have to render the whole of the drawing on every frame of the animation. All of my attempts to use Images or Pixbufs to store the partial results have met with naught but empty white screens with just the last few commands rendered.

For the curious the changes are available in the bzr repository: http://www.vrplumber.com/bzr/hare-graphics

Anyway, I'm hoping I can sleep now... night all.