[vtk-developers] Proposing vtkObjectMacro

[David Gobbi]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 9:33 AM, Patchett, John M <patchett at lanl.gov> wrote:
> Though I don't usually involve myself in VTK development, I think
> that obfuscated understandability is part of the reason that I've seen
> a large number of otherwise bright developers (students) become
> integration impotent when asked to put their ideas/code in
> VTK/ParaView...
> If a goal is to have contributors, this is a bad idea.
>
> --John.

I agree that obfuscation and usability (and code style) are
significant barriers to broader adoption of VTK.  That and the fact
that a lot of VTK looks like C code.  Back when VTK was first
developed, most people thought of C++ as an extension of C, but these
days I think it's best to think of C and C++ as two completely
separate languages that have very good interoperability with each
other.  And VTK code is guaranteed to look very odd to any
recently-trained C++ programmer.

It is my belief that within the next few years, code refactoring tools
will become sufficiently advanced that we will be able to modernize
VTK without having to spend an obscene number of person-hours doing
so.  And, yes, I do think that such a modernization will be necessary
in order for VTK to survive in the long term.  But right now, with VTK
6.0 on the horizon, we are stuck with macros so we should try to make
the macros that we have as intuitive and sensible as possible.

 - David