Derelict Updates
Sunday, October 29th, 2006Over the past few weeks, Derelict has steadily been getting some needed updates. Most of the work has focused on DerelictGL — support for loading nearly all of the ARB extensions has been added (currently support for the WGL_ARB and GLX_ARB extensions are not implemented), a start has been made on EXT extensions, and support for OpenGL 2.1 has been added. OpenGL 2.1 support has not yet been tested, so if you put it to use please report any problems you have in the Derelict forums.
The other major update from recent weeks is the complete removal of DerelictGLFW. The reasoning behind the removal is documented in two separate forum posts, one from me here, and one from John Reimer in this thread (scroll down to see it). If you are using DerelictGLFW, feel free to continue to do so — there just won’t be any support for it from the Derelict team.
Other updates include several bugfixes and improvements to the internals.
I’m hoping to be able to ramp up work on Derelict in the coming months. There are a handful of new packages I’d like to add, but work still remains on the existing packages. One of the features that’s waiting to be implemented is a static interface to allow direct linkage to import libraries on Windows and shared object files on Linux, allowing users to bypass Derelict’s manual dynamic loading and let the OS handle it. I personally prefer the manual method, which is the primary reason I started Derelict in the first place, but having both options provides more flexibility. I’d love to give a timeline on when this will be implemented, but that never works out for me. I’ll get started on it once I finish up with the OpenGL extension support.
I’m also eager to make GDC and Mac support a reality. I don’t have a Mac and, as much as I want to, am not going to be able to get one in the near future. Mac support requires GDC support, so if anyone can get both up and running I’ll be grateful. For the most part, implementing it would just require that the proper version checks are made and that the correct shared library names are used in the load method of each package. There probably will be some additional work with DerelictGL, though, since right now there is some code that relies on WGL and GLX that will likely need to be versioned to use AGL on Mac (but I know nothing of that, so I’m just guessing).
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