On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 10:00 AM, Ben Coman <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> Backward compatibility can be a divisive subject.  The disparate views
> expressed at [1] will give you a general overview of Pharo's philosophy.
> Now your question is slightly different to the usual backward-compatibility
> discussion that relates to the existing codebase inherited from Squeak and
> before.  Here on of Pharo's goal to enhance future maintainability by
> elimination of "legacy code", where [1] defines "legacy code" as:
>   - a code written eons ago
>   - original authors are gone/not interested in communicating
>   - no documentation
>   - a lot of patches and extensions from various authors over ears
>   - often same functionality implemented using two different ways
>   - things are completely bizarre, unmaintainable and unable to understand
>
> So for the existing code, while compatibility is kept as much as possible,
> cleaning takes priority.  While this might cause some early pain, the mid
> to long terms should end up better than otherwise.
>

Very reasonable and pragmatic.

>
> Regarding  "once something is developed in Pharo will it work unchanged on
> _all_ future Pharo versions?" I would hazard to guess, considering the
> keyword "all", that the answer is "no". The Pharo team are pragmatic about
> what they can achieve with their resources.  If something can provide more
> (in terms of maintainability and broader usage) for a given effort, then
> that is probably the path to be taken.
>
> [1]
> http://lists.gforge.inria.fr/pipermail/pharo-project/2012-December/072196.html
>

Thanks for the link. Very illuminating.


>
>
> cheers -ben
>
>
>
>  Maybe we need a GL3ViewportMorph to live along side GLViewportMorph.
>
>
>>  As for plans for OpenGL support, normal and accelerated GUIs, I am
>> working in OSWindow.
>>
>
>  I have read a little of this -- very exciting!
>
>
>>  OSWindow provides support to manage native operating system windows
>> purely from image side. With Igor, we made a custom image and VM for Linux
>> in which we removed almost everything graphic related from the VM. The only
>> support needed in the VM is a small check for event presence in the VM
>> heartbeat.
>>
>>  For OSWindow, we made initially a XLib based back-end. To reduce
>> maintenance efforts for Windows and Mac OS, I made a new backend based in
>> SDL2. It is quite complete and I have tested mostly in Linux. For Windows I
>> could make it work, not perfect so it needs more testing and a complete
>> removal of the old Win32 drivers. I don't have a Mac for testing, but Alex
>> is going to help me there.
>>
>
>  If there is something I can do to help with the Mac I would like to.
>
>   I have to tell the CMakeVMMaker to also build SDL2 before building,
>> instead of having to build/install it manually. After that I think that we
>> can start integrating into Pharo 4.
>>
>>  As for OpenGL, SDL2 gives me a multi-platform abstraction for creating
>> a window with an OpenGL context. I already made it work with NBOpenGL, the
>> only tricky part is dependency order when loading the stuff in the image.
>>
>
>  Yes, SDL2 is the way to go.
>
>   In fact, I already started making a new 3D graphics engine Pharo, to
>> rewrite Roassal 3D on top of this one in the near future. Soon I will be
>> posting some screen-shots of this engine.
>>
>
>  Sounds interesting!
>
>
>>  With this graphics engine, I am also going to try to make an Athens
>> backend, for accelerated vector graphics. Vectorial graphics with OpenGL
>> are very hard to do fast, specially self intersecting bezier curves.
>> Stencil based testing is simple, fast, supported and efficient for this job.
>>
>
>  Very nice. Is Athens used to render the main UI elements (windows,
> buttons, bitmaps, text, etc?).
>
>  It's not clear to me how the OSWindow work will result in a faster Pharo
> UI. On OSX, at least, underneath everything is already an OS window that
> supports GL and other accelerated calls but the Pharo graphics primitives
> don't take advantage of this. Won't they need reworking?
>
>   Greetings,
>>  Ronie
>>
>>
>> 2014-05-30 11:10 GMT-04:00 Sean P. DeNigris <[email protected]>:
>>
>>> darrinm wrote
>>> > Oh, and NBMacGLConstants is lacking necessary constants. Is it manually
>>> > created or generated somehow?
>>> >
>>> > - darrinm
>>>
>>

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