[vtkusers] VTK Roadmap

[David Gobbi]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 12:47 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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


Python 3 is being worked on (right now by me, and others can join in a
couple weeks once the core pieces are in place).  No, it won't be part of
6.3, however.

 - David
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