Came up with a good idea while driving the car home this afternoon listening to ABB's Live At Fillmore East and some Joe Satriani. (Ah, driving, rain and long jam music...both great inspiration...)

There is no reason why I can't write a C graphics engine and interface the OpenGL program to any program (including Perl) over named-pipes, sockets, or equivalent.

app  ---> commands over pipe  --> gfxEngine
     <---  events over pipe   <---
(where the app can be written in *any* language)
[download]

</code>

This system would be really cool as I would have a graphics engine that is 100% cross-language (if not cross-platform) -- in theory, it might even be able to write OpenGL programs in bash.

This seems better than the Inline approach (though Inline rocks) since I could pretty much develop a solution usable from any application, standarding on IPC protocols rather than language constructs. The performance tradeoff of using IPC rather than system calls should be neglible, and this would allow me to develop any number of utility functions in C for speed improvements.

Also, this seems like it might have a bit more community interest as well -- rather than just another way to talk to OpenGL.

Best of all, I'd have a cross-language graphics engine usuable immediately in all languages I ran across with...even future ones.

I'll still have to hammer out the protocols and so on, but this is definitely doable and I'm going to give it a shot.

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