[Paraview-developers] Re: [vtk-developers] Removed windows.h from VTK headers.

[Bill Hoffman]

At 09:59 AM 12/17/2004, Brad King wrote:

>>I think Bill Hoffman had another solution for compilation speed-up that would not require changes in the application code, but I'm not sure I can sum it up. Bill ?
>
>It was the same solution that John B. just specified about VTK mangling symbols in place of windows.h.  We are not going to use that solution.


The problem with that solution is that it does not fix the compile errors that other applications using VTK can get.  The solution only fixes the speed issue.

The correct solution for this problem is to rename all of the methods in question to names that do not conflict with Windows.h.   GetClassName -> VTKGetClassName, etc.   If we were starting VTK with knowledge of this problem, that is what we would do.   However, that would cause backwards compatibility to break, which is a bad thing.   So, I suggest, that we keep the same basic approach that Brad has implemented, but instead of calling the methods *Internal(), we call the method the name that it would have been if we were starting from scratch.   Then we provide methods for backwards compatibility that call the new method, and they
have a comment explaining the problem.

-Bill