St. <dot### [at] dotcom> wrote:
> As it happens, from a non-programmers point of 
> view, I think this thread has been a frenzy of what everyone *wants*

  No, it's not about what everyone wants, it's about what POV-Ray needs.

  POV-Ray needs to improve, else it will slowly fade into oblivion.
The SMP support in POV-Ray 3.7 bought it time, which is really great,
but I'm afraid that will not be enough in the long run. The SMP support
is a huge card for POV-Ray, but it just needs more if it wants to survive
another 15 years.

  One thing which POV-Ray needs is more rendering features which would
bring it back in par with other renderers.

  While many such rendering features must be added to the core code
because there's no other option, there are, however, a whole lot of
features which can and should be implemented by scripting. These can
often be implemented as surface shaders and such.
  Implementing them with scripting has tons of advantages. The features
become more flexible, easily modifiable (without having to recompile
the entire program) and extensible. POV-Ray should move from a rigid
monolithic architecture to a more flexible architecture where features
can be added without touching the core code. Only features which simply
cannot be implemented with scripting, for example because of efficiency
reasons, should be implemented in the core code.
  There are also many other features which would benefit from scripting
support, such as importing and exporting of file formats (how many times
has a converter from POV-Ray to other formats been requested?)

  Also, POV-Ray cannot simply drop its scripting language. This is simply
because the scripting language is one of the major features, which
differentiates it from many other similar renderers. I fear that if
POV-Ray was a pure renderer, with no scripting support, it would have
been forgotten long time ago.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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