[squeak-dev] Trying to load ALienOpenGL into 4.1 alpha...

Josh Gargus josh at schwa.ca
Mon Mar 22 23:29:40 UTC 2010


I don't think that Alien was ever in trunk.  IIRC the guy who wrote AlienOpenGL was a "Pharo guy"... I think that Pharo has Alien in by default (but I don't follow it closely).  To get it to run, you'll have to load the prerequisite Alien code first.  I haven't done this myself, so I have no particular advice for you.

BTW, why do you want to use AlienOpenGL, instead of "Croquet OpenGL"?  Just curious?  I wouldn't use it myself for performance reasons.  For one thing, Alien is slower than the old FFI (Eliot has ideas about how to JIT the marshalling code, but it's not on his short-term list of projects).  More importantly, AlienOpenGL uses Alien very inefficiently, or at least it did the last time I looked at it, I think in December.  Every time you call an OpenGL function, it looks up the function address from scratch instead of caching it somewhere.  I don't remember the precise results of the benchmarks that I did, but the overhead was terrible; it would be unusable for any moderately complex scene.

OTOH, if you're looking for something fun to hack, AlienOpenGL might be just the thing.  It wouldn't be hard to cache the functions so that they're looked up only once; this would have a tremendous impact on performance.

Cheers,
Josh



On Mar 22, 2010, at 3:47 PM, Lawson English wrote:

> hi all, was trying to load AlienOpenGL into 4.1 alpha and got the warning:  This package depends on the following classes: AlienLibrary
> 
> Is this deprecated for 4.x or renamed or..?
> 
> 
> Thanks, Lawson
> 




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