[vtkusers] can you create a vtkPoints(VTK_DOUBLE)

[Will Schroeder]

Hi Sebastien-

At 02:57 PM 1/26/2001 +0100, Sebastien BARRE wrote:

>We had this discussion before privately, but I was wondering : apart from the fact that this whole "switching stuff" might be more difficult to maintain than a generic template solution (to my opinion), did you notice an impact on the performance ? I do not have a perfect coverage of the whole code, but is there any part where the switching is done in the most inner loops ?

Two comments come to mind. First, maintaining a template solution sounds good, but if you have ever seen a heavily templated system like the NLM/NIH Insight Segmentation/Registration Toolkit that we are involved in, you would swear that you are looking at a foreign language, certainly not C++. Not only that: but how do you wrap and manage template instantiation for interpreted language bindings? We now think we have a solution for this, but in 1993 we didn't. Also, even in 2001 we have all sorts of problems compiling heavily templated code, the compilers are still behind.

Second: the switching is done once, in the execute method, that invokes a templated function. So there is little performance effect.

Will