Re: [Gnu3dkit-discuss] Coin 3D library

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

Hi,

sorry for the late answer and slow progress - I am being swamped with 
work currently...sigh

On Friday, March 7, 2003, at 04:11  Uhr, Brent Gulanowski wrote:
> On Friday, March 7, 2003, at 04:09  AM, Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:
> > it's of course always good to know other approaches. Inventor has a 
> > good design IHMO, esp. for a C++ toolkit - I 'borrowed' the concept 
> > of actions from Inventor, actually. But when diving into it, please 
> > be aware that the choice of the language affects the design a lot!
>
> OK. I certainly prefer Objective-C to C++. I'd have thought, though, 
> that you could divide up the features of a software product and say, 
> "These are language specific, and those are language independent." As 
> for other approaches, it's not only good for me to study them, it is 
> essential.
>
> So far, I have rough ideas on how dynamic messaging will be 
> beneficial. And categories are very useful. But I have not thought of 
> anything as dramatic as what is in OpenStep, like the responder chain, 
> or class clusters. 3DKit takes advantage delegation. My reading says 
> that delegation is just a "better" multiple inheritance. What other 
> Objective-C features can we leverage?

Protocols, notifications, categories, ... there are a lot of these 
language and API features which will lead to a different design. The 
question is IMHO how much can we make use of these features considering 
our performance constraints which we have when doing interactive 
graphics.

As an example, while I like Inventor I dislike the amount of classes 
which come with it. I hope that a good design will lead to a small but 
flexible and powerful code base.

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip