2015-01-20 15:28 GMT+01:00 Claude Heiland-Allen
Ok, I do understand this philosophy,
Just to be clear: This is basically not *my* philosophy, but the one used in OpenGL itself. It is partly explained in the OpenGL spec itself, partly by the fact that almost no OpenGL call has a return value to indicate success/failure (unlike e.g. the *nix system calls). This is probably an artifact from the time of the buffer-less fixed rendering pipeline, when you had tons of OpenGL calls frame and any kind of error checking would have been prohibitively costly. If OpenGL would be designed today, things would look different, I guess. Anyway, in my experience fighting against any kind of design philosophy in your program is a lost battle in the end, and that's why the OpenGL binding is like it is.
but one last suggestion: replace 'alloca' with 'with 0' to at least avoid reading uninitialized memory when the application programmer makes a mistake (0 should be a sensible default in most cases I imagine). If git patches for this replacement would be accepted, I would be willing to submit them for as many places in the binding as I can find.
I think it might make sense for the places where the value is actually unmarshaled, so the unmarshal function might call "error" for unknown values. For basic types like GLfloat/GLint/... it doesn't really make sense and doesn't hurt: The value is just undefined, and 0 is not really better. In our concrete case of "shaderVar", poking 0 into "buf" first would be OK then. If you like, you can prepare a GitHub pull request for this and other sensible places. That's easier than sending patches around by hand and comment them. Create a GitHub account, fork the OpenGL repo, upload a fix and send this as a pull request, it's only a few clicks... :-)