Re: [FreeWRL-develop] Codebase port to c++?

[Ian S. A. <ia...@ae...>]

On 16/04/13 12:50 PM, doug sanden wrote:
>  
> the gglobal() thing comes to mind. It's 1:1 with 'browser' as seen by
> SAI, so instead of looking it up by thead it could be passed back to the
> SAI client in the opaque browser pointer, and passed back in on SAI calls.
> .
> web3d.org specs show abstract base classes to nodes. It might help
> programmers if we were following it more closely.

Interesting idea...


>>
>> I think if we were to do this change, this would put us into FreeWRL-3.
>>
> Might need a fork until it was stable and proven? If it broke too many
> things it might lose developers -all their hard work destroyed,
> demoralizing us. So it might depend how well it was refactored. If
> you've ever read books on agile programming or eXtreme programming they
> talk about unit tests being run after each refactoring step, so they can
> roll back if they break something.

Yes, we would definitely want to fork.  same idea as what we did when we
split the freewrl codebase into freex3d, for the autotools build system
and code refactoring.


>  
> We don't have an automated test suite. So perhaps that could/should be a
> first step.
>  
> But even then,
> Q1. how to set up unit testing to test all the platforms including
> smartphones and tablets, and 64bit, from any one single platform, in a
> fast, convenient feedback way?

I don't think it's possible, in the same way that I don't think it's
possible to use one common build system.


> Q2. And how to do unit testing on computer graphics, with input devices
> and rendered output, and multiple frames and events involved?

also don't think it's possible, at least in an automated way.  We can
test on a benchmarking system what the differences are for output of the
test .wrl files, but that's the closest we can do I think.