From: John Gabriele <jmg3000@...>
Date: 2006-10-16T11:18:28+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby-opengl

On 10/15/06, Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@path.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> John Gabriele wrote:
> > On 10/15/06, Talha Syed <talhasy@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> Hi all.
> >>
> >> [snip]
> >>
> >> So, does anyone know of a good, easy to install OpenGL/GLUT library that
> >> I can use on Mac OS X? Thanks in advance for the replies!
> >
> > Well, we haven't made a release yet, but you might grab (via svn) and
> > build the files from http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-opengl/ and
> > give it a shot. I think it should work for Mac OS X.
>
> It's good to know someone's maintaining this very useful library.
>
> Do you have any general plans for it, beyond maintenance?

Short term plans:
* Use mkrf instead of our own hand-written top-level Rakefile to build
it (this is already partially in-place, but besides waiting for the
next mkrf release, I still don't know how to make rake decend down and
use each of the extension-specific Rakefiles (see the included
build.sh script for the interim kludge)).

Long term:
* Get some scripts together to help us bring it up to date with
current OpenGL (see utils/README).

Not sure whether to make a release before or after we make attempts to
bring it more up to date, since it currently doesn't offer much if
anything beyond Yoshi's last version (except maybe that it builds on
Mac OS X).

> I was browsing the svn tree and saw something that could be improved:
> there are some explicit type checks that might not be necessary, such as
> this in gl_ClipPlane():
>
>      if (TYPE(arg2) == T_ARRAY)
>         ary2cdbl(arg2, equation, 4);
>      else
>         rb_raise(rb_eTypeError, "type mismatch:%s",rb_class2name(arg1));
>
> Since ary2cdbl() calls rb_Array() on its arg, conversion is done if the
> arg is not an array. It's not a big deal, but it's nice to make an API
> as duck-like as possible...

Thanks for the tip! I'm only now just learning how to make extension
modules, and will file this tip away for future use.

> Btw I'm planning on rewriting a 3ds loader (was in c++, and not a free
> license) in pure ruby. Do you think it would make sense to include it
> with ruby-opengl?

Not sure, but I suspect not. Do you think your loader might merit
having its own RubyForge project?

Anyhow, feel free to bring this up on our project mailing list.
ruby-opengl things are moving kinda' slowly at the moment, as I'm
still learning and also currently job hunting.

---John