Re: [oglbase-discuss] New GLX_ARB_get_proc_address specification

[Jon Leech]

On Thu, Nov 04, 1999 at 02:58:47PM -0700, Brett Johnson wrote:
> I agree that it is possible to come up with a mechanism to find all
> possible 3d drivers, then query them to determine which extensions they
> support.  But it seems like a lot of work to me, and I don't see any reason
> to do it.

    Which is equally true for the context independence issue to a good
number of us, so I don't think a "lot of work" objection is in and of
itself sufficient.

> What is your reasoning for wanting a NULL pointer to indicate
> that "no currently available driver supports this extension"?

    That's what most of my last two posts were about, but to summarize:
it is misleading to the application, noop behavior creates debugging
nightmares, and no reasonable error behavior appears possible.

    IMO this is dlsym() on steroids to handle the loadable driver issue
- not a precognizant API that anticipates everything you might ever want
to do in a GL app. If the function exists somewhere in the
implementation, you should be able to get at it. If not, why pretend
otherwise.

    Jon Leech
    SGI