Well, if people really needed cross-platform 'dll's, you could always go
the route of setting up JNI hooks and writing the 'dll' in Java. That way
you'd have bytecodes that would run on many platforms. (Or maybe...
POV-Ray could be made to call a Java method. That Java method could be
set up to in turn call a platform-specific native module via JNI, or just
fall back to a pure Java implementation, and could even switch
dynamically at run-time. Arrrggghhh! No.....! Stop!!! my head hurts....)

Of course, with the speed factor and all, especially with raytracing, I
would definitely say don't do that. Just stick to good clean C.


Ronald L. Parker wrote:

> On Sat, 02 Jan 1999 13:19:23 +0000, Daren Scot Wilson
> <dar### [at] pipelinecom> wrote:
>
> >What I don't know is which OSs *don't* support DLLs (by any name)?
>
> I assume you mean "operating systems currently supported by POV-Ray."
> I can name at least one: MS-DOS.  I think Macs don't support dynamic
> libraries, as well, but I'm probably mistaken.  AmigaDOS supports
> dynamic linking, as does OS/2.  Many unices don't support dynamic
> linking.  I think perhaps VMS doesn't support dynamic linking, though
> I suspect there's no longer an official VMS version (if there ever
> was.)

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