[vtkusers] VTK Roadmap

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 10:58 AM, Berk Geveci <berk.geveci at kitware.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> As Dave DeMarle mentioned, we are gearing towards a VTK 6.3 release. VTK 7
> will follow very shortly (in weeks). I'd like to shed some light here on our
> thinking and how we are planning to move forward.
>
> As was previously discussed in the VTK developers list [1] [2], we are
> considering maintaining VTK 6.x for a long time (3-5 years) while moving
> forward with VTK 7 and 8 in 2015 and 2016. There are some major changes
> happening in the computing and C++ worlds and we would like evolve VTK more
> quickly to stay up to date. Some of the major changes that we are
> considering and/or working on are:
>
> * Major refactoring of rendering (OpenGL as well as ray tracing etc.)
> * Multi/many-core support / SMP computing on CPUs and accelerators. VTK-m
> integration [3].
> * Changes to data model to support zero copy interface to other data
> layouts, more efficient APIs, more cell types, more dataset types etc.
> * Better separation of a public, wrapped API and toolkit/C++ internal API
> mainly to support efficiency
> * Introduction of C++ 11 features
>
> Much of this will require introducing changes that break backwards
> compatibility and also require newer compilers, graphics cards / drivers
> etc. So the idea is that we will do our best to support as much as possible
> a broad set of architectures and backwards compatibility but break things
> when necessary in VTK 7 and beyond. We will maintain VTK 6.x so that folks
> that are stuck on legacy systems or code bases can continue to benefit from
> bug fixes. We have a way of continuing to maintain a broad set of dashboards
> and also the same review process as VTK master so that we can continue to
> ensure the quality of VTK 6.x as well as new releases.
>
> What do you guys think? Please provide feedback so that we can adjust our
> plans to meet the needs of the community as much as possible.

I would like to put in a humble plea to add Python 3 compatibility to that list:

http://astrofrog.github.io/blog/2015/05/09/2015-survey-results

Best,

Matthew