Re: [Caml-list] Interactive technical computing

[skaller <skaller@users.sourceforge.net>]

On Thu, 2007-03-08 at 22:28 +0100, Vu Ngoc San wrote:

> If you really need interaction in the window and in the toplevel at the 
> same time, you can launch the sdl mainloop in a separate thread. It 
> really works. 

No it doesn't. It works on Linux, but not on Windows.
Messages on Windows go to the thread that creates the
window, and fetches are done by default on the current
thread's message queue. X maintains a queue per
process, so it works on Linux (but be careful because
even re-entrant X isn't really re-entrant).

SDL has a serious design bug: it can't be used as a library,
it insists on providing the mainline (you can hack around
this though). On Linux, you don't have to do this because
the SDL mainline does nothing.

OpenGL has an even more serious design bug: contexts
are implicit. This is extremely bad design: it was
designed to work with serial code and optimise use
of a single video card.

-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net