verjigorm wrote:
> Yes, I already downloaded the code. Just wanted to check if any extension
> already exists and if a feature like library support is going to be added
> some day.
 > Sounds like a good idea to me, you know like in MATLAB for instance.

No, it is an extremely bad idea as it is not portable and all this has been 
explained several times in these groups.  It is never going to be added to 
any official version of POV-Ray.

	Thorsten

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Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> No, it is an extremely bad idea as it is not portable and all this has 
> been explained several times in these groups.  It is never going to be 
> added to any official version of POV-Ray.

Not only that, but all it would take is one badly written plugin to 
corrupt POV-Ray's memory and crash POVRay with the blame on the POV-Team.

Though, I suppose you could use CORBA, COM, SOAP or any other IPC 
technology... <g,duck>

-- 
~Mike

Things! Billions of them!

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in news:420b9bbd$1@news.povray.org Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> No, it is an extremely bad idea as it is not portable and all this
> has been explained several times in these groups.  It is never going
> to be added to any official version of POV-Ray.
> 

I've seen this awnser so often to similar questions, but I'm wondering, 
why does it work for other programming/scripting languages. I what way is 
POV-Ray different. I can imagine that it would be complex to add a new 
ray-traceable object through a module, but how about other stuff like, for 
example a database interface. 

http://python.active-venture.com/ext/intro.html
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ext_ruby.html

Ingo

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in news:Xns95F9D1BD7FE35seed7@news.povray.org ingo wrote:

> but how about other stuff like, for 
> example a database interface. 
> 

probably not the best example, her's another one: write the core of a slow 
mesh-creation macro in C and use it as if it is an include file or a part 
of an includefile package.

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"Thorsten Froehlich" <tho### [at] trfde> wrote in message
news:420b9bbd$1@news.povray.org...

> verjigorm wrote:
>  > Sounds like a good idea to me, you know like in MATLAB for instance.

Yes, it does sound like a good idea - however, for reasons Thorsten so
vigorously defended but didn't bother to explain, it probably won't happen.

> No, it is an extremely bad idea as it is not portable and all this has
been
> explained several times in these groups.  It is never going to be added to
> any official version of POV-Ray.

I've often wondered. Bearing in mind my ignorance of high-end programming,
wouldn't it be possible to run a binary with a command line switch to tell
it to take advantage of specified system-specific libaries?

Bugs would be the responsibility of the library author, unless the bug was
repeatable w/o the library being loaded.

Or would such libraries be horribly inefficient?

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Thorsten Froehlich schrieb:
> verjigorm wrote:
>> Yes, I already downloaded the code. Just wanted to check if any extension
>> already exists and if a feature like library support is going to be added
>> some day.
>  > Sounds like a good idea to me, you know like in MATLAB for instance.
> 
> No, it is an extremely bad idea as it is not portable and all this has been 
> explained several times in these groups.  It is never going to be added to 
> any official version of POV-Ray.

I would like to ask why this would be not portable? Any platform POVRay 
runs on should support dynamic loading. Or does POVRay compiles under 
plain DOS?

For my self I don't have any application to use such an interface off 
POVRay because my .pov's are written from another programm or by hand. 
It's only a technical question.

-- 

mat### [at] matweide
http://www.matwei.de

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> Thorsten Froehlich schrieb:
> 
>> verjigorm wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, I already downloaded the code. Just wanted to check if any 
>>> extension
>>> already exists and if a feature like library support is going to be 
>>> added
>>> some day.
>>
>>  > Sounds like a good idea to me, you know like in MATLAB for instance.
>>
>> No, it is an extremely bad idea as it is not portable and all this has 
>> been explained several times in these groups.  It is never going to be 
>> added to any official version of POV-Ray.
> 
> 
> I would like to ask why this would be not portable? Any platform POVRay 
> runs on should support dynamic loading. Or does POVRay compiles under 
> plain DOS?
> 
> For my self I don't have any application to use such an interface off 
> POVRay because my .pov's are written from another programm or by hand. 
> It's only a technical question.

Dynamic loading and linking is not standardised across platforms. Each 
OS has it's own way of loading an external module and "fixing up" the 
procedure addresses.

-- 
~Mike

Things! Billions of them!

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> I would like to ask why this would be not portable? Any platform POVRay 
> runs on should support dynamic loading.

  Show me the C++ code which performs loading of dynamically linked
libraries in any platform.

-- 
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
[1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
-1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// - Warp -

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> Thorsten Froehlich schrieb:
> 
>> verjigorm wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, I already downloaded the code. Just wanted to check if any 
>>> extension
>>> already exists and if a feature like library support is going to be 
>>> added
>>> some day.
>>
>>  > Sounds like a good idea to me, you know like in MATLAB for instance.
>>
>> No, it is an extremely bad idea as it is not portable and all this has 
>> been explained several times in these groups.  It is never going to be 
>> added to any official version of POV-Ray.
> 
> 
> I would like to ask why this would be not portable? Any platform POVRay 
> runs on should support dynamic loading. Or does POVRay compiles under 
> plain DOS?

Not sure if in there completely, but certainly searching further would 
reveal some of the even older threads about the very same topic:

<http://news.povray.org/povray.programming/thread/%3Cweb.3dc175b4282cec51d2ac4d730%40news.povray.org%3E/>

Please lets not have the same disscussion over and over again.  Just Google 
for something like

site:news.povray.org povray.programming plugin

and you get enough hits with thread about this topic.

	Thorsten

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Warp wrote:

> 
>>I would like to ask why this would be not portable? Any platform POVRay 
>>runs on should support dynamic loading.
> 
> 
>   Show me the C++ code which performs loading of dynamically linked
> libraries in any platform.

More important: Show that every potential user of POV-Ray on even just there 
three officially supported platforms has a C/C++ compiler to compile the 
plug-ins not available for this platform.  And don't get me started about 
platform-specific plug-ins.  This whole discussion always ends up in the 
same obvious points getting mentioned, and I really fail to see why so many 
people don't first try to think about the potential problems (when they are 
told there are problems) rather than expecting them to be spoonfed to them 
<sigh>

	Thorsten

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