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<DIV><FONT face="Courier New" size=2>Hi all,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Courier New" size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Courier New" size=2>First, let me start off saying a huge thank
you to everyone who has contributed towards VTK - it is, without doubt, the most
comprehensive, powerful and easy-to-use graphics package I have yet seen.
I only have one real qualm, which is the fact that you need to drag in so much
code just to use a tiny piece of the functionality.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Courier New" size=2>I spent a good few hours reducing the size
of required files yesterday, but there's still huge slabs of code that I will
never need, yet must be linked in because of apparently unnecessary
interdependencies in the code.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Courier New" size=2>In particular, vtkGraphicsFactory causes
dependencies with all the volume ray cast/texture stuff that you can't
avoid. For now, I've commented these out. For some reason I'm still
stuck with a lot of vtkVolume stuff I don't need, although by modifying #include
"vtkVolumeRayCastMapper.h" to #include "vtkVolumeMapper.h" in
vtkVolume.cxx, I reduced the list considerably.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Courier New" size=2>Indeed it's odd that just by including a
header file you seem to drag in a bunch of dependencies, even though the code
doesn't directly seem to reference them.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Courier New" size=2>I believe the vtkGraphicsFactory problem
can be fixed by using a dynamically created factory map (class name to creation
function pointer) - that is, each class is responsible for putting its own entry
in the factory map, although to be honest, if it was just done through a
#define, it would be better than nothing.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Courier New" size=2>I know library size isn't an issue for a
lot of users, but it is for me, especially because library size can directly
impact performance in lowish memory situations.</FONT></DIV><FONT
face="Courier New" size=2>
<DIV><BR>Oh, one other tiny thing - there's two memory leaks, one of which you
can work around, the other that can't be. The first is the graphics
factory itself, which requires a manual call to
vtkObjectFactory::UnRegisterAllFactories() to dispose of, the other is the
vtkTimerLog array, which currently there is no mechanism to free. It's
just annoying because it took a while to determine that it wasn't a bug in my
code that was leaking memory.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Thanks for any feedback</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Dylan</DIV>
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