[vtk-developers] Templated filters

[Luis Ibanez]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 3:22 AM, Biddiscombe, John A. <biddisco at cscs.ch> wrote:
> I'd like to agree with Bill, and possibly Luis's long winded rant (though I'm not sure what he really wanted to say).
>
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I must apologize to David and to the list
for my poorly phrased email of yesterday.


It wasn't only rude but it also missed to clearly
convey the points that I wanted to make.


The points are:


A) Although ITK and VTK are very similar systems,
     they have different domains of application.

     Features that may be considered essential in VTK
     might be undesirable in ITK, and the other way around.

     Evaluating ITK design's decisions based on the
     requirements of VTK is as misguided as evaluating
     VTK's design and implementation based on the
     requirements of ITK.


B)  ITK enforces type-awareness in application developers.
     This is essential when dealing with medical applications.

     It simply comes down to a requirement for enforcing
     correctness and promoting safety when managing
     patient data.

     When application developers miss type-awareness they
     can easily destroy information that is vital for the proper
     functioning of a medical application.

     Using C++ Templates as a mechanism for enforcing
     type-awareness is certainly an inconvenience for wrapping,
     but wrapping is not the guiding consideration in the context
     of medical applications.

     Wrapping makes life easier for developers who don't
     want or don't need to be aware of specific types, for
     example the pixel types of images.

     In the context of medical applications, relaxing type
     awareness is only acceptable for doing:

                      1) Rapid prototyping
                      2) Teaching exercises


      Medical applications, that go into clinical use, require
      type-awareness and most likely will be implemented
      using C++.



Again, my apologies to David and to the list for my failure
to express technical ideas in a civilized manner.



        Luis