1libraries(3) Coin libraries(3)
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6 libraries - Coin use of 3rd party libraries. Coin may use a wide
7 variety of 3rd party libraries, directly and indirectly, depending on
8 how the Coin build was configured. This document tries to summarize the
9 situation. Some of the libraries that are a standard part of an
10 operating system are ignored here.
11 This document expects that the reader is familiar with library build
13 processes and has knowledge of various concepts such as 'configure-
14 time', 'linktime', and 'runtime' related to library builds and
15 behaviour.
16 First of all, Coin requires OpenGL. Depending on the OpenGL version,
18 features in Coin are turned on and off. If a feature Coin is supposed
19 to support does not seem to produce any result, make sure to check that
20 the underlying OpenGL version does support that feature. OpenGL is
21 linked into Coin both at linktime and runtime. Features added to OpenGL
22 later than the oldest version of OpenGL we support in Coin are always
23 tried linked up at runtime, and failure to do so will disable features
24 in Coin or cause alternate implementations of features to be used
25 instead.
26 OpenGL is accompanied with a set of auxiliary libraries we also use.
28 These are libraries like GLext, GLU (for NURBS tessellation and texture
29 mipmaping amongst others), CgGL (for shaders that use Cg (we recommend
30 using GLSL instead BTW)). Of these libraries, CgGL is loaded at runtime
31 if needed, while the others are linked with Coin at linktime.
32 Some platforms have GLU libraries that don't behave properly in certain
34 respects, and some Coin users have particular needs wrt Coin's use of
35 GLU. For these users, we (at Kongsberg Oil & Gas Technologies) have
36 created a fork of GLU that we have named SuperGLU that we have tweaked
37 in certain ways. This library can be checked out into the Coin source
38 code directory, which will be detected at configure-time and linked
39 statically into Coin and used instead of the GLU libraries on the host
40 system.
41 In addition to these libraries, Coin will use AGL on Mac OS X, WGL on
43 MS Windows, and GLX on X Windows Systems for offscreen rendering
44 purposes.
45 We now move on to libraries that are not related to OpenGL.
47 Coin uses libz (aka zlib) and libbzip2 to read and/or write files
49 compressed with either of those compression techniques. Both libraries
50 can be linked with Coin at linktime or loaded at runtime, and this is
51 controlled at configure-time. They can also be disabled if compressed
52 file input/output is not wanted. The libz library is likely to be
53 pulled in as a dependency from other libraries as well, especially
54 graphics libraries.
55 For font support, Coin uses Fontconfig or FreeType in addition to
57 native platform APIs for font reading. Freetype can be loaded at
58 runtime instead of linked at linktime if desired, but FreeType is only
59 used if Fontconfig is not found at configure-time anyway, unless the
60 library builder overrides this behaviour.
61 For JavaScript support in VRML97, Coin uses SpiderMonkey. SpiderMonkey
63 can also be loaded at runtime instead of linked at linktime.
64 For sound support in VRML97, Coin uses OpenAL. OpenAL is loaded at
66 runtime or linked at linktime. BTW, some versions of the OpenAL library
67 delivered with installers from Creative on MS Windows have been known
68 to crash/freeze Coin-applications when loaded, so if you experience
69 something like that, that's one thing to investigate.
70 For threading support, Coin uses POSIX threads (pthread library) or the
72 native Win32 API on MS Windows. You can use pthread on MS Windows as
73 well instead of the native threads by setting this at configure-time.
74 We now come to a special class of libraries that has been directly
76 integrated into the Coin source code, thereby not requiring the
77 libraries to be installed on the system beforehand for Coin to build or
78 run.
79 Coin makes use of certain utilities like smart-pointers from Boost. The
81 boost headers can be found under include/ in the Coin source code
82 directory. No boost types are exposed in the Coin API, nor will they
83 ever be. They are completely hidden, viewed from the outside of Coin.
84 All boost types used in Coin are completely inlined in the boost
85 headers and therefore do not require a link library to pull their
86 implementation from at runtime.
87 For XML reading, Coin uses the Expat library, which has also been
89 integrated directly into Coin, so also here there are no extra linktime
90 or runtime dependencies to other libraries. The Expat API is not
91 exposed in the Coin API, it is hidden, but Coin provides its own XML
92 DOM API that is a wrapper over the Expat engine.
93 The last thing to mention here is hardly a library, but we mention it
95 anyway. Coin uses flex and bison to generate some parsers (one for the
96 STL 3D model file format, and another one for parsing the calculator
97 language in the SoCalculator engine). This is code that has been
98 generated by 3rd party parser generators and integrated into Coin. The
99 generated code is distributed with the source code, so neither flex nor
100 bison is needed to build Coin.
101 And last but definitely not least, Coin uses simage...
103
105 Coin uses a library called simage, which is a 1st part library since we
106 have written it ourselves. Simage is a thin wrapper library over a huge
107 set of graphics and audio libraries, to provide Coin with a unified API
108 for loading images (textures), audio, and animations, regardless of
109 which image file format it is stored as. The simage library can in
110 other words pull in another set of 3rd party libraries. All 3rd party
111 libraries to simage are optional. Simage is loaded at runtime or (if
112 specified) linked at linktime with Coin.
113 Simage can use:
115 • QImage from Qt to add support for the file formats Qt supports.
117 • GDI+ (gdiplus) under MS Windows to add support for the file formats
118 supported by GDI+.
119 • QuickTime under Mac OS X to add support for the file formats
120 QuickTime supports.
121 • libungif or giflib for GIF file support.
122 • libjpeg for JPEG file support.
123 • libpng for PNG file support. This will also require that zlib is
124 used.
125 • libtiff for TIFF file support.
126 • JASPER support for JPEG 2000 file support.
127 • mpeg2enc for MPEG2 encoding.
128 • vfw (Video for Windows) for AVI video encoding.
129 • libogg, libvorbis and libvorbisfile for Ogg Vorbis support. This is
130 for VRML97 sound support in Coin.
131 • libsndfile for VRML97 sound support in Coin.
132 • libguile for a Guile (Scheme) binding for the Simage library API.
133Version 4.0.0 Wed Jul 21 2021 libraries(3)