mesa tesselator
Jon Harrop wrote:
Have a look at the GLU polygon tesselator.
I have witnessed a project using the GLU polygon tesselator
that worked fine until the polygons got remarkably larger,
and somewhere between chiliagons and myriagons the GLU polygon
tesselator crashes. I am not sure which version of MESA was
used in that project (most likely 3.0 or later), but it might
be that the MESA polygon tesselator has some features/bugs that
prevent its proper operation in some conditions. Three senior
software engineers did review the surrounding code most
carefully since this was a hard-to-believe situation for the
MESA library.
Checking the versioning history of MESA reveals quite some
bugs in the tesselator and even a report of "reverting
back to tesselator 1.1", hinting that building a tesselator
might not be quite as easy as one would initially expect.
If you decide to use the MESA GLU polygon tesselator, you
may be just fine, but test the code most carefully that it
really works in the conditions where you really need it to
work.
Sometimes, especially in human safety critical scientific
computation, such as structural engineering, medical
computing or nuclear engineering, you do not want to rely too
much on sloppy things like OpenGL-drivers, where a driver change
may actually change the computation. There, a statically linked
MESA-library can be more favorable, offering you something static
that you can test against, instead of the computational behaviour
changing with each display driver release.
.
