Stuart Anderson wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 16 Sep 1999, Brett Johnson wrote:
> 
> > Rather than just providing a spec that says where libGL.so should live, we
> > should provide the libGL.so itself, and turn libGL.so into nothing more than
> > a thin dispatch layer that "drivers" can plug into (this proposal would turn
> > Mesa into a "driver", for example).
> 
> I like this idea a lot. In fact, it has many similarities with what we do in
> our (Metro Link) product. However, this needs to be part of a different
> specification as it is an Architectural specification, and not an ABI
> specification which is what (I think) Jon is currently documenting. Including
> this directly in the current specification would prevent other valid
> architectures from claiming complience just becasue it is a different
> architecture.

You are correct of course, this is not the appropriate forum for hammering
out a dispatching architecture.  My apologies for getting a little exuberant
about promoting the architecture.

What I've been trying to say with this approach does have bearing on the ABI
spec though.  I think it's a bad idea to return context-specific function
pointers from the proposed gl*GetProcAddress function.  The only valid
objection I've heard to returning a context-independant pointer is that it
would adversely affect performance.  So my venture into the architecture
realm was to show that such an architecture could be high performance,
therefore, performance degradation was not a valid argument for a poor
design decision (i.e. returning context-specific pointers).

Cheers!
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