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On Wed, 16 Dec 1998 00:24:05 -0500, Nathan Kopp <Nat### [at] Kopp com> wrote:
>This is true. Unfortunately, one of the most important aspects of POV is
>its multi-platform capabilities. For the record, the Isosurface patch
>and the SuperPatch (the SuperPatch does have the isosurface patch in it,
>right?) do allow user-defined functions for patterns.
Yes, it is compiled into the superpatch. In fact, it was in a sense the
first patch to be added to the superpatch, oh so long ago.
>And you can use
>dynamic libraries in windows and unix. But the two OS's don't use the same
>libraries, and you can't use them on any other platform. :-(
Correct, and for that reason I've been told that if the isosurface patch ever
does make it into the official version, it'll probably be without the dynamic
linking, even on the platforms that support it.
Another of the things on my "difficult-to-impossible" list of things I'd like
to do someday is a bytecode compiler (possibly with OS-specific hooks for a
JIT compiler) to handle a (hopefully large) subset of the Renderman Shading
Language, all without dynamic linking. If someone's written a JIT compiler
for your platform, you could be looking at the speed of a hardcoded texture
even on platforms that don't support dynamic linking. If not, or if you're
on some B&D platform that doesn't allow self-modifying code, you'll lose
some speed but no functionality.
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