[pdal] Fwd: Point cloud viewer in QGIS

Andrew Bell andrew.bell.ia at gmail.com
Tue Jul 7 06:01:50 PDT 2020


On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 3:31 PM Martin Dobias <wonder.sk at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 9:07 PM Howard Butler <howard at hobu.co> wrote:
> >
> > No plan for a PDAL C API. Just extra stuff to manage for little benefit.
> PDAL's C++ API has been quite stable since about 1.6 or 1.7 release. More
> specifically, if you use higher level APIs like the PipelineManager or
> PipelineExecutor, they will insulate you from API changes. We have done our
> best to preserve pipeline behavior and syntax throughout releases, as this
> is the real definition of PDAL activity. This also conveniently gives other
> language implementors (Python, Java, Julia, Matlab) a mechanism to drive
> PDAL without having to deeply implement a large API surface.
>
> Is there a way for me to tell which APIs are high level and which
> aren't? For example, classes like LasReader, PointTable, PointViewSet?
>

No.


> I am a bit worried that without guaranteed API stability we may run
> into trouble easily - even safely looking changes such as adding a new
> private member variable or a new virtual method may change ABI and
> then cause crashes if a newer version of PDAL would be released and
> dependent QGIS code would not get recompiled... For example Qt library
> has policies (like using d-pointers everywhere) and extensive tests to
> make sure the ABI does not get broken between releases...
>

Isn't this what library versioning is for? Don't package managers routinely
deal with this? Multiple versions of libraries can co-exist and if you
replace a library with an incompatible one, you'll get a runtime error when
the required library can't be located. I'm not that familiar with Windows,
but I thought that typically DLLs were provided with an app to get around
the lack of DLL versioning.

-- 
Andrew Bell
andrew.bell.ia at gmail.com
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