[Mesa-dev] rationale for GLubyte pointers for strings?

[Patrick Baggett]

SGI invented OpenGL and offered it first on their IRIX platform. SGI's
MIPSpro compiler has the "char" datatype as unsigned by default, so the
compiler would likely complain if assigning a GLbyte pointer to an
[unsigned] character pointer. Thus, to do something like

char* ext = glGetString(GL_VENDOR);

doesn't require a cast on IRIX, while the same code would require a cast
using other compilers due to the aforementioned problem.

Patrick


On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 1:44 PM, Allen Akin <akin at arden.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 12:20:54PM -0600, tom fogal wrote:
> | glGetString and gluErrorString, plus maybe some other functions, return
> | GLubyte pointers instead of simply character pointers...
> | What's the rationale here?
>
> I agree, it's odd.  I don't remember the rationale, but my best guess is
> that it papered over some compatibility issue with another language
> binding (probably Fortran).  I suppose there's a very slight possibility
> that it sprang from a compatibility issue with Cray.
>
> Allen
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