The Open Inventor Compatibility of Coin
=======================================

The Open Inventor API is HUGE, and achieving 100% compatibility with
it is going to be a feat.  Ultimately, we want Coin to be 100%
compatible with Open Inventor, but for now we have chosen to be
incompatible in certain areas.  Some of these incompatibilities will
be purely internal and not noticeable for people who develops Open
Inventor-based applications.

There are certain notable "hacks" in the latest version of Open Inventor
that are set aside for now.


Incompatibilities
=================

* SoType should be able to load user-extension types contained in
  dynamic libraries if the type can not be found in libCoin (Bugzilla
  #246)

* SoByteStream class not implemented (Bugzilla #173)

* SoTranSender and SoTranReceiver classes not implemented (Bugzilla
  #174)

* no support for the Inventor v1 file format (Bugzilla #152)

* Typed Open Inventor objects can not be created before the type system
  has been initialized (by calling a combination of SoDB::Init(),
  SoNodeKit::init(), SoInteraction::init()).

  This only works almost for other Open Inventor implementations - try
  for instance creating an SoBlinker node before calling init().

