OpenGTL 0.9.8/0.9.9, GTLDesigner 0.9.1, libQtGTL 0.9.0 and shiva-collections 1.0

Today, I made a bunch of releases related to the OpenGTL project. Ranging from the main library, to some utilities and wrapper for Qt applications.

The main library comes with two version one for llvm 2.4 (OpenGTL 0.9.8) and one from llvm 2.5 (OpenGTL 0.9.9), the two main improvements are:

• a new memory management model, so far each time an object was created it was allocated in memory, and since most objects have a very short life time this was leading to excessive computational time, since putting all objects on the program stack was such a nightmare to manage correctly, I simply started to use a shadow stack with preallocated memory, this is less efficient than using the program stack, but gives massive speed improvement compared to allocating memory through the system
• a new kernel collection system, the previous system for collection of kernels wasn’t practical to use and required compilation of all kernels at load time, which is very unefficient. The new one was written while doing at the same time integration in a real world application, aka Krita.

libQtGTL is a library that provides wrappers classes and configuration widgets for Kernel for use in Qt applications that want to use kernels, the screenshot below show an exemple of such use in Krita:

From now on, I also start to ship Shiva kernels in an external tarball, in shiva-collections, the goal is to update more often that tarball than I do update the library. It contains the examples that were available previously in OpenGTL tarball, and also some new effects, such as the calleidoscope:

All this is available at OpenGTL’s download page.