[vtkusers] VTK 6.3.0

[David Gobbi]

Hi Siavash,

I'm not the David who posted the announcement, but I can help to clarify.
And I also have a background in image registration, so what the heck.

1) VTK has been using some parts of OpenGL 2 for a long, long time
already.  The big change is that VTK has now been completely converted to
OpenGL2, so it is possible to build VTK with all OpenGL 1 code removed.

2) VTK had a lot of OpenGL 1 code.  Tons of it.  Converting that code to
OpenGL 2 is a lot of work.  It would have been a lot of work in 2005.  It
would have been a lot of work in 2010.  Just because OpenGL 2 has existed
for a long time, that doesn't mean that magic tools have appeared that
automatically convert OpenGL 1 code to OpenGL 2 code.

3) In addition to converting all the OpenGL 1 code to OpenGL 2, many
features were added to take advantage of OpenGL 2.

4) VTK didn't stop at OpenGL 2.  The new backend simply requires OpenGL 2
as a minimum.  It allows use of features and extensions from later version
of OpenGL.

5) This change was overdue, for sure.  So we have to thank Will Schroeder
and Kitware for all the effort they put forth to get the NIH grant that
allowed the work to be done.

 - David


On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 4:57 PM, Siavash Khallaghi <siavashk at ece.ubc.ca>
wrote:

> Hi David,
>
> I am coming from an image registration background and my question is most
> likely trivial to you and most people in the graphics community. Given that
> OpenGL2 was released in  2004
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#OpenGL_2.0>  , I am wondering why
> migrating to it is difficult?
>
> Siavash
>
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