Wings 3D Development Forum

Ok long random rant..

Sigh, I hate this Erlang discussion, that pops up from time to time, if you worked on S-Geometry you know LISP and you know why functional languages is nice to program in.

Erlang is what makes Wings3D as stable as it have been, how many real crashes and bluescreens have you had in these years, and most of these crashes have been dependent on the OpenGL drivers anyway.

Now that I have started to rewrite the gui in wxWidgets (which is a C++) library, and I promise you we will get more random crashes, which will be really hard to debug. Which is really sad but we need to bump the looks from 1999 to 2010 :-)

We have started to require OpenGL 2.0 (which is really old now) to modernize and optimize that part of
the code and we get complaints that Wings-2.0.X does not work for some users.

Some more comments about performance, when Wings was designed in 1999, a model of 1500 faces was about the largest models made and not workable in wings. So Wings ground design was not made to handle 10000 faces or above, we cut corners to make it possible to develop as a one man made project,
which it still is more or less, i.e. performance have never been prioritized and until we have 10 developers that collaborate on a large re-write that will never happen.

Erlang is really good at using multi core systems, actually one of the best languages for doing that type of programming, though Wings was made before multi-core systems existed and need a lot of work to become partly concurrent. Google WhatsApp and Erlang for one example!

What Wings3D need is one (or two) young great developer with lots of time and energy not old dorks that needs to sleep at night. Programming takes time (at least for me), the last two months I have coded wings at least 30 hours per week, that is after my normal work hours, so you can guess what my wife thinks of me, I'll soon be kicked out the house. But for me right now coding wings is fun, next month I will be tired of wings and something else is fun and I will do that instead.

Remember this is a hobby for us.

Yeah - I didn't mean anything negative - just saying the disadv for me.
I thought it was generally positive actually.
Sorry for your reaction. Best wishes.

Honestly, I don't see the purpose of this thread! Instead of debating on this why not create and help promote Wings 3d by what you create? And there are lots of other apps on the market, no one force you to use Wings, if you don't like go with the other software at your choice.

Quote:Yeah - I didn't mean anything negative - just saying the disadv for me.
I thought it was generally positive actually.
Sorry for your reaction. Best wishes.

No problem :-) I'm just tired and need a vacation from my hobby

Edit: Well, was my 2c, only, after some decade around. Deleted.

Enough unintended negativity.
Is there a page somewhere on how to get going with Wings3D development ?
- Erlang setup, IDE choices, how is code organised ?

Of course there is - its got its own forum Section.

If you are on windows MSYS2 for bash, make.
Standard erlang installation, the latest released version always
Preferred IDE:
Emacs or vim if you can handle them they are the best for erlang dev, otherwise eclipse or intellij
Basic git knowledge is good.

Neon22 ... both JEdit and Sublime Text have Erlang syntax highlighting. I think one or both ave code folding and other nice things. That should be enough for starters. Or use use Emacs or VIM as Dan cites.

I used j Edit before, since time in time Dan complained about indentation I ended up to use Intellij. It's huge but with erlang plugin it's good as well as it enable us to use format code with emacs - there is one for Erlang too.

Jedit has fully configurable indentation (soft tabs inserted as spaces). You pick how many spaces you want injected. Most editors allow this. So rejecting JEdit for that reason alone ... a wee bit silly.