Johannes Dahlstrom wrote:
>normdoering wrote:
>
>> How about "plugins?" A lot of programs, like Corel Draw, have programs you
>> can plug in to Corel to do extra fancy stuff to pictures. I think they're
>> ..DLLs...?
>
>
>It has been proposed before... the big problem with plugins is that there's
>no platform independent way to implement them.

True. That only means you can compile the same C code on different compilers
for different machines. And can you really do that without changing the
code in some header or include file somewhere?

> Windows has dll's and *nices have .so's etc.

I don't know anything about "nices have .so's etc."

> Plugins compiled on one platform wouldn't work on other.

So? Versions of POV-ray compiled for Windows don't work on Apples.

It seems code for plugins could be as platform independent as the POV-ray
code... unless there's something I'm missing. It may be just a matter of
changing a few header and include files to make the same code work on
various platforms, same as POV-ray.

>Besides, if they would be distributed in compiled form, other users
>couldn't modify them to suit their needs.

True. That's the price of speed. But I don't want be able to modify
everything, as a user ... besides, I did say plugins would be an easy
stepping stone toward compiled macros. Once you could do that the plugins
would become obsolete. Doing a plugin version gets you part way to compiled
macros that are platform independent because the compiled macro would
behave just like a plugin.

> Making their sources availabele wouldn't help much, because one would
> need a separate compiler to use them.

Make headers and include files for the various platforms available like you
make different compilations of POV-ray available.

>IMO it's much better to have a dedicated, powerful language to do this kind
>of stuff.

True. But that's going to be harder to do because you have to write a
compiler into POV-ray and doing plugins would take care of one part of the
work, interfacing with a compiled program, and let users find the bugs
before you did the more complex task of actually writing a compiler.

You could simply implement plugins quicker than you could make macros
compile.

--normdoering

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