povray.org admin team wrote in message
<35553d06.26038110@news.povray.org>...
>>What should have been done was an ActiveX./DLL
>
>'Should' by your standards perhaps. Active X didn't exist at the time (as
you
>should well know) and we won't use a DLL because it allows POV-Ray's
renderer
>to be too easily subverted by leechware.
>
>Really, if you want a DLL-based renderer, why don't you simply write your
own ?

I've same feelings about ActiveX than you : not portable.
But shared libraries or at least static ones, exists on every plateforms /
compilers. And highly portable at source level.

Why a "DLL would allows POV-Ray's renderer to be too easily subverted by
leechware" ?

A library version of PovRay, shared or not, still could display legal
informations at STARTUP_POVRAY() and/or FINISH_POVRAY().
From User's point of view (UPOV?), he would see a POV-Ray startup screen
just after clicking on "Render now" button of his application. And then the
preview / final window on these application displaying result.
Exactly like today with Moray for Windows, Breeze Designer, Calimax or
Texture Magic...
But from these applications developers, a better "technically" integration
of POV-Ray renderer could be made, with callbacks for preview and final
rendering, rendering messages, pre and post traitment of output, in place of
pooling image output file and log files...

Okay, we could write our own DLL-based POV-Ray renderer. I actually trying
to do this for Win32.
But I want this DLL-based version to be thread-safe. Because of globals
variables and some others code's stuffs, I've to rewrite many modules.
And what a pain to do this, again, for future versions !

But perhaps I miss something about "subverted by leechware" ?

Phil.

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