IL is the code present in an assembly that will run on the CLR or other implementation of .net technology. Can a complete OGL program be compliled into IL? Will creating class libaries or a wrapper for each host OS be needed? Im intrested in how much hypothetical effort it would be needed to create a true cross-platform binary 3D graphics program, but don’t plan on attemting one in the near future. I’m not particularly intrested in how practical this would be, either.
…really a n00b question but im curious and likely only an advanced coder would have tried such a thing…
As IL presumably can express calls to native services from the host OS, then yes, you can call OpenGL from IL.
You’re not buying that “.net is portable everywhere” message, though, I hope? They’ve tried that ploy before.
.net has the that portable capablity, yes, though MS will only implement it on its various operating systems. This move is needed to be able to escape window’s dependance on x86. Hopefully projects like mono will be successful and IL could run on unix variants(and theres one for almost every platform).
It might be nice if MS actually capitalized on the portablity, and developed professional implementations of .net for other platforms sold at a price (I would buy it).
The question still left in my mind:
I already knew that you can make native calls, but would making native OpenGL calls on various platforms require porting/recompiling of the code with the native calls, i.e. would the entire binary be portable?
[This message has been edited by nathahn (edited 02-14-2002).]
Why would OpenGL be any different from, say, native file I/O calls?