Re: Guile/GL/GLUT and POSIX threads trick (any hope?).

[Rob Browning <rlb at cs dot utexas dot edu>]

Clifford Beshers <beshers@cs.columbia.edu> writes:

> I switched to Scheme->C, and I wanted real objects, not integers
> that hide objects, etc.  I havne't cleaned up my OpenGL interface,
> and it would need to be updated for guile, but I've been down the
> GLUT route, and it's not the right way to go.  It's good for what
> it's designed for, but not much else.

Thanks for the advice.  I actually came to the same conclusion, and
I'm back to using Guile + GTKGlarea + g-wrap.  The main reason I tried
GLUT in the first place was that it seemed to be the only common
library supporting GL-ish fonts/text-rendering, and I need that.

I've decided, however, that I'm better off sticking with Guile and
maybe pulling out/writing my own font routines.  It'd be really nice
if there were an easy way to take a true-type or postscript font and
convert it (at a given resolution -- for some definition of
resolution) to a specification you could use in a GL routine at run
time.  I feel fairly certain this could be done, but I haven't had the
time to look in to it yet.

I'm surprised that something like this isn't common already.  Perhaps
it is, and I just haven't come across it yet.  In any case, it's
fairly important for technical demonstrations where I need to label
nodes and edges in 3-D.

(Another note for those interested in the GL/g-wrap stuff.  The g-wrap
 author's back now, and we're going to work on getting things together
 for a new release.  I'll see if he's interested in putting the (very
 preliminary) GL stuff in an "examples" directory or something.  This
 should work for both RScheme and Guile.  Stay tuned.)

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930