Hi All, My current focus is on the VulkanSceneGraph, exploring C+11, Vulkan and new ideas of what a next gen scene graph should look like. OpenSceneGraph is still very much my baby though. Stuff that is working well on the VulkanSceneGraph could serve as a model for what we can do to elements of the OpenSceneGraph, so potentially as advances are made in VulkanSceneGraph would could refactor the OpenSceneGraph to take advantage of similar approaches.
While OpenSceneGraph will remain focused on OpenGL and aim to retain good backwards compatibility there may be opportunities to make life easier to OpenSceneGraph users. One of these areas is taking advantage of some of the features that C++11 has to offer. So far on the VulkanSceneGraph side I've experimented with some low level equivalents of things like ref counting, ref pointers, observer pointers taking advantage of C++11 and it's a delight, the code is SOOOO much simpler and cleaner that what's presently in the OpenSceneGraph. So I'd like to put out the topic for discussion about whether we could set the min compiler version of the OpenSceneGraph to C++11 for the next major stable release. I don't have any specific plans to this next stable release, I'm assuming it'll be 4.0, it'll likely be another year or so before being released. I would like to this OpenSceneGraph stable release to sync in a bit with the VulkanSceneGraph efforts but as this project is just beginning the schedule for it's own releases is completely open. When I say sync a bit, I'm really just referring to taking opportunities to cross pollinate ideas a bit, make co-existance of the two projects easier, what that will mean in practice I absolutely can't say, it's really just an aspiration right now. Back to C++11, the pros of adopting it for OpenSceneGraph-4.0 is that we could simplify parts of the core OpenSceneGraph, making it both easier to lean and maintain. Potentially even OpenThreads could be removed as dependency and then from the core OpenSceneGraph and made it's own separate project once again. The cons of adopting C++ would be restrictions on just how old the compilers can be to be used with OpenSceneGraph-4.x, so could limit one aspect to backwards compatibility. I would suggest that OpenSceneGraph-3.x series remain compilable without needing C++11. So 3.6.x for instance we'll make bug fixes etc but never change the compiler requirements. Thoughts? Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
