I wanted to jump right on the lib3ds work before testing the new system further, but bad intuition kept me from doing that. I got intrigued by the errors I had gotten when testing and I was not content with the current work-around. Testing the system, I understood that the system was (read: is) unstable and unfinished. I realized it was missing an important feature, that Stéphane had mentioned very early in the project: cross-language polymorphism.

Basically, cross-language polymorphism allows the system to automagically support implementations in both language. If a C++ implementation is not present, the system tries to use the Python version if it is available. SWIG supports this feature through directors. To replace this feature, I had to study in more detail how directors are implemented in SWIG and how I could “recreate” them easily within our system.

The same way that I created a proxy mechanism to support Python to C++ redirection, I decided to support directors by having C++ objects store a reference to the Python object owning them. This gives  them the capability to “redirect” some of the execution back unto Python methods. If a C++ object uses the interface class method at runtime (instead of its own implementation), it will use the related Python object’s method if it is available, else will print an error message.

So far, the contour style module works correctly but style modules with shading function in Python do not work yet. To ease testing, I will (finally) have the style module selectable from the UI.