forked from coin3d/coin
-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Coin3D core library
License
kazssym/coin
Folders and files
Name | Name | Last commit message | Last commit date | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Repository files navigation
Coin 2.0.0 Copyright 1998-2005 Systems in Motion http://www.coin3d.org/ Introduction ============ Coin is a 3D graphics library with an Application Programming Interface based on the Open Inventor 2.1 API. For those who are not familiar with Open Inventor, it is a scene-graph based retain-mode rendering and model interaction library, written in C++, which has become the de facto standard graphics library for 3D visualization and visual simulation software in the scientific and engineering community. Release 2.0.0 ============= Release 2.0.0 is a major release, meaning it is not compatible with Coin 1.x. It is compatible with client code written on top of Coin 1.x, though, which means an upgrade of client source code to the new Coin should just be a matter of a recompile. See the file NEWS for the summary of changes, and the file ChangeLog for the detailed list. See the file INSTALL for installation instructions, and the README.* files for platform-specific notes. Source Code and Binary Compatibility ==================================== Coin is one of three Open Inventor implementations. All implementations are source code compatible across the Open Inventor 2.1 API. Source code compatibility means you can write software for a given API and at build time choose to use any implementation of that API. Which one should not matter - the software should function the same way with all of them. The Open Inventor implementations are not Application Binary Interface compatible with each other. This means it will not work to first build a piece of software against one implementation of an API and then later replace the run-time library with another implementation of the API. Some libraries have ABI compatibility in this way (OpenGL and Mesa, Motif and Lesstif) but those libraries are C libraries, and do not have to worry about different memory footprints for objects and different entry orders in the virtual function tables amongst other things. Coin is binary compatible with itself. Each release of the Coin library has a version number that consists of three digits. They are called "major", "minor", and "micro" version numbers, respectively. Coin 1.2.3 has major 1, minor 2 and micro 3. * All releases with the same major and minor version number have the exact same API and ABI. Such releases are called patchlevel releases, and only consist of bugfixes, documentation updates and and updates to the packaging. Two weeks after Coin 1.0.0 was released, enough bugs had been found and fixed to warrant a new release. We therefore released Coin 1.0.1, which also goes by the name Coin 1.0 patchlevel 1. * All releases with the same major number are upwards binary compatible. Such releases are called minor releases, and are releases made to add new extensions to the library API. Upwards compatibility means that applications linked with one version of Coin will not have to be rebuilt if you or the end-user of your application install a newer version of Coin with the same major number and a minor number that is greater than the library the software was initially linked with. Let's say an application you have distributed was based on Coin 1.0.1 and then Coin 1.1.0 is released, your users can safely upgrade their Coin library without needing a new version of your application. This also works the other way for most platforms, as long as the software does not actually use any of the extensions that have been introduced after the release of the library you downgrade to. This can be a bit tricky to get right (sometimes you might reference new functionality in an indirect way), so if you really need to have backwards compatibility like this, the best thing is to link with an old version of Coin (e.g. Coin 1.0.0) and then release the software with the newest version of Coin (e.g. Coin 1.1.2). Then, the end-user can safely downgrade the Coin-library on his side without any extra hassle. The Coin API documentation will clearly state for which minor release an extension was introduced, so you can stay away from those functions if it is important, and so you can document with your software what the lowest acceptable Coin library version is. * Releases with different major numbers are not compatible with each other. They are called major releases, and break compatibility with the other major releases of the library on purpose. The purpose of major releases is to clean up the library API (as for any evolving project, this has to be done once in a while) and change the fundamentals where they can be improved upon. Run-time libraries with different major versions can safely coexist on a system at once, so installing Coin 2.0.0 does not mean that you must scrap all the Coin 1.*-based applications you may have. On Windows, the DLLs are named differently for each major release, so there will be no mixups between coin1.dll and coin2.dll. On UNIX systems, the application will at load-time look for a shared library named libCoin.so.#, where # will be indicative of the library ABI version. Different major releases will have different # numbers, so the files do not conflict. However, there can only be one Software Development Kit for Coin available at once. A Software Development Kit constitutes the header files and static libraries. The declarations in the Coin 1.0 header files will conflict with the declarations needed for producing code for Coin 2.0. When you install the Coin 2.0 SDK, it will overwrite the headers for Coin 1.0 unless you take special measures to prevent it. You can therefore only develop software against the version of Coin you installed most recently. To circumvent this limitation, you need to do some trickery with include and libdir paths. Historical Notes ================ Coin started out, back in 1995, as a scene graph rendering library for VRML1.0 scenes. It was originally based on SGI's Qv library for parsing files in the VRML1.0 format. After years of extending this humble beginning with new functionality like VRML1 and VRML2 rendering and export, the library was in late 1997 in dire need of a fundamental redesign. On the surface, the API looked quite like Open Inventor already. The concepts used by Open Inventor are also often mentioned as good design methodologies in many software engineering books, and some of our developers had had some experience with the library in advance and found it incredibly convenient. At the same time as we were contemplating a rewrite, the Free Software Movement got some great buzz going, and we saw the golden opportunity to homestead our library as the Free Software alternative to Open Inventor. We therefore decided to go for the rewrite, and after a short period coined the name Coin. As luck would not have it, as soon as we went to beta status with Coin for SIGGRAPH 2000, SGI also decided to release their Open Inventor as Free Software. It soon became apparent though, that SGI Open Inventor was released to mainly be kept in maintenance mode. This made us confident that continuing the Coin development would still be well worth it. The development of Coin has been done primarily on Linux and IRIX systems, and later with Cygwin systems when we introduced the Windows port. Many people have contributed through the years to the success of Coin, be it in the form of patches, problem-reports, or other kinds of feedback to the core Coin developer team. They have been credited in the file THANKS. Prophecies ========== We have now achieved full Open Inventor V2.1 compatibility, which was a feat in itself. That is not enough, though. We want more, and we know you want more too. More supported platforms, more features, more performance and optimizations, more file formats... We want it all, but it all depends on the available resources and customer interest, which varies from moment to moment. We therefore have a general policy of not giving out specifics and dates too long beforehand. -- OpenGL and Open Inventor are trademarks of SGI Inc.
About
Coin3D core library
Resources
License
Stars
Watchers
Forks
Packages 0
No packages published
Languages
- C++ 81.2%
- C 12.2%
- Shell 1.2%
- TeX 1.1%
- CMake 1.1%
- Batchfile 0.9%
- Other 2.3%