Fernando D. Mato Mira (matomira++at++ligsg2.epfl.ch)
Wed, 15 Jun 94 14:56 MDT
Have you thought about giving the possibility to the users
of choosing how the processes should be spawned (that is,
using sproc instead of fork).
When using sproc the drawing, culling process callbacks
should take one more argument (the private data block).
I think this would be quite easy to implement. This is
very important for people who have a HUGE application
that they do not want to clone for every process. (in my case,
I run Performer from Lisp, and I do not want to copy 20Mb
of developent environment, libraries, GUI toolkit, application
on things that might even not need Lisp (for example if the
cull callbacks are all writen in C). When the callbacks need
Lisp, I might want to refer to things in my app (I have
multiple processes, locks, etc in Lisp, too), so it has
to be ONE Lisp.
What's more, even in the case when you fork the processes,
and I replicate Lisps, I might need to initialize the Lisp in
the other process, if I am going to call Lisp routines as
callbacks, or in C callbacks. This is possible for the
draw process (pfInitPipe), but not for the cull process.
When processes are spawned via sproc, I might need
to initilize a lisp process representing the corresponding
Unix thread (this assumes a lisp where processes are implemented
using Unix threads).
Thanks
Fernando D. Mato Mira
Computer Graphics Lab
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) Phone : +41 (21) 693 - 5248
CH-1015 Lausanne FAX : +41 (21) 693 - 5328
Switzerland E-mail : matomira++at++di.epfl.ch
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Mon Aug 10 1998 - 17:50:20 PDT