It seems the ARB/Khronos is going to sepparate the core layer and the application layer and blah blah and to make an official OpenSDK with docs, examples, etc etc etc
My question and suggestion is to include into that C++, C#/VB/J#/IronPhyton/RubyNET, Java and D wrappers. Of course, the current C implementation should persist because most of the parts in the OS are written in asm and C… and well some people still works with C. No problem with that.
Currently, I can pass a GL_CUBEMAP_FACE_POSITIVE_X to, for example, glHint. That is because C is not enough “strong typed”. If you see at DX10, when you render to a cubemap yoou need to use a IDirect3DCubeTexture and a eCUBE_FACE. If you try to pass a “0xBC16” to that the compiler will complain because is “strong typed”.
Also, if you see at the current gl.h/glext.h is a monstruous file with tons of “0xBAAD” things, too much integer types that you can easy mistake, etc… Some OOP job will rock there.
If you see at Managed DirectX, XNA, etc, Microsoft did that for DirectX. Extrapolating that will be good to see a D3DX OpenGL library, highlevel OOP interfaces, etc… In general more OOP in OGL will be good.
The question is if Khronos is the one that should do that or we could live using 3rd party wrappers like Tao, JavaGL, etc…Well I think an official SDK should include this in the same manner Microsoft does with MDX, XNA and the DirectX SDK which include .NET wrappers, C/C++ and COM interfaces.
Btw… it appears there is not much information about what the Khronos SDK will include and the new OGL application layer… anybody have more information that could share pls? All I see is some abstract specs at Khronos, and the EGL Native platform… no track of the promised SDK.
thx