Rafal 'Raf256' Maj <spa### [at] raf256com> wrote:
> Indeed, lets stop adding any interesting new rewolutionary futures, since 
> Pov-RAY already left all other renderers far-behind.

  Perhaps *you* will be willing to explain us where exactly the plugins
should be called in the POV-Ray core, what would they do, and how they
will be better than having a strong scripting language?

  All this thread seems to revolve around the same theme: Plugins are cool,
plugins are great, plugins are omnipotent, I want plugins. Many people
seem to think that plugins are some magic code which can insert itself
in any place inside an existing binary and do whatever it wants freely.
  Well, they are not. If you want plugins you'll have to explain where
exactly should the core code call the plugin and which features the
plugin will be able to reimplement. (Also explaining why only those
features and not other ones would be cool.)

  The original suggestion was that there could be a plugin system in
the user-defined function feature of the SDL (that is, where you write
"#declare Something = function(...) { ... }" some dll function could
be called.
  My question is why. That would be extremely awkward and the feature
would only be available for a small percentage of people. It's specially
awkward because there are much better solutions to the same thing
(enhancing the SDL for instance). Putting a dll plugin support there
would only cause more problems that it's worth, and its usefulness
would be extremely limited (after all, an SDL user-defined function
is just a function which takes some numerical parameters and returns
a numerical value; its use is very limited, certainly not worth the
trouble, specially when there are much better solutions to the same
thing).

  A plugin system is not the answer. A better scripting language is.

-- 
plane{-x+y,-1pigment{bozo color_map{[0rgb x][1rgb x+y]}turbulence 1}}
sphere{0,2pigment{rgbt 1}interior{media{emission 1density{spherical
density_map{[0rgb 0][.5rgb<1,.5>][1rgb 1]}turbulence.9}}}scale
<1,1,3>hollow}text{ttf"timrom""Warp".1,0translate<-1,-.1,2>}//  - Warp -

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