On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 19:24:06 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> I also find it odd that members of the Official POV-Ray Team would be
> trying to basically shout down discussion on the POV-Ray news server about
> POV-Ray features, but that's another thing.

You're not the only one.  As I mentioned in what I just wrote to Thorsten,
I see it as just so much cognitive dissonance to be closed-minded about
potential features in what is for all intents and purposes an open-source
project.

Sure, someone's got to decide what goes in and what doesn't, and maybe
these external functions don't belong in the official builds, but that
doesn't invalidate the discussion or possibility for a fork in the code to
support the desired functionality in an unofficial build.  It's not like
there haven't been unofficial builds of POV-Ray that added functionality
above what's in the official build.

Personally, I find the discussion here fascinating, because I deal with
technology that is cross-platform and in fact is implemented through the
use of shared libraries on different platforms - on Linux, using shared
libraries, on Windows using DLLs, on the NetWare platform using
NLMs, and on other Unix platforms using the same type of shared libraries
as on Linux.

The base functionality runs from the standpoint of a common codebase, with
a variety of techniques used to port the shared library functionality
between different platforms.  I don't pretend to know very much about how
it is technically achieved, since I'm not a software engineer (though I do
code a fair bit), but having seen technology implemented in the
closed-source world that implements precisely what Thorsten is saying is a
bad idea, I can state unequivocally that it is in fact possible and not a
bad idea, because it allows code reuse on a much greater scale.

That said, I don't know the internals of POV-Ray as well as Thorsten
undoubtably does, so it's definitely possible that he knows something
about the architecture of POV-Ray that I don't and maybe there is
something inherent in the POV-Ray code that prevents something like this
happening.

I can say that portability of shared libraries in a cross-platform
environment helps the company I work for port things between multiple
platforms by increasing code reuse without building monolithic products
using unique code on each platform - and if it wasn't possible or was
technically very difficult and cumbersome, we wouldn't design software to
run on Windows, NetWare, Linux, AIX, and HP-UX because it just wouldn't be
economically feasable.

Jim

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