[vtk-developers] About the vtkDataArray::InsertTuple() method

[Will Schroeder]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 12:11 PM, David Lonie <david.lonie at kitware.com>
wrote:

> Anyone else want to share an opinion?


Polishing the API and code is a good thing, and we've seen a lot of organic
growth and improvement over the 22+ years VTK has been in existence. Done
thoughtfully with minimal disruption I am fine with it.

Having said that, I think there is sometimes a tendency to get caught up in
too much polishing and software process and forget core algorithmic and
performance concerns. There are so many algorithms and emerging computing
technologies that we need to integrate and/or add into VTK. For me APIs are
a secondary concern to capability. For example, I think that STL's API
absolutely sucks but I use it because the implementation is often quite
good, and it provides capabilities that benefit me, so I put up with the
API. Another example is the recent OpenGL2 work: we could have revamped the
API/design since there are arguable deficiencies in the
lights/cameras/actors model, but Ken & Team made the hard to decision to
mostly preserve the API warts and all and rework the inner workings seeing
10-100x performance gains with little impact on current applications except
that they are a lot faster. That makes customers really happy. Changing API
makes them really mad. Before we were constantly getting complaints about
rendering speed, rarely about API, and now those rendering complaints seem
to be mostly gone.

Long term VTK will thrive because it's up to snuff in terms of current
algorithms and computing capabilities. A perfect API will not prevent it's
death. Surely it's a balance, I get that, but IMO I'd like to see more
cycles go into algorithms, computing, and performance.

Best,
W


-- 
William J. Schroeder, PhD
Kitware, Inc. - Building the World's Technical Computing Software
28 Corporate Drive
Clifton Park, NY 12065
will.schroeder at kitware.com
http://www.kitware.com
(518) 881-4902
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