[Ohrrpgce] Gfx backends be uniform dll's?

[Ralph Versteegen]

2009/12/30 Jay Tennant <hierandel8 at crazyleafgames.com>:
> Should all the graphics backends have the same form and function names? Should they all be contained within their own dll?
>
> For uniformity, I think they should. It'd make switching backends during execution easier--less coding. Btw, this is discussing the next generation of backend interfaces, not the current system.

It could be less coding, if we were writing them from scratch.
However, switching during execution is done (the new interface will
not mean having to rewrite much of anything), and I don't see how it
can be less than zero work :) Unless you meant the as of yet
unimplemented switching from one to another... in which case I do not
understand your argument at all.

The main benefit that I see to splitting backends into shared
libraries is that it could mean being able to distribute eg.
gfx_alleg.dll but not alleg40.dll, and just disable gfx_alleg until
the large required dll is acquired seperately, without having to muck
around with using dylibsymbol/GetProcAddr on all the alleg40.dll
functions.

I don't think we should needlessly ditch statically linking the
backends, which means having to also split them off as shared
libraries on linux, which seems like a lot of trouble to me. While
unlike on windows, shared libraries on linux are simple to create, I
don't think distributing them is.