Hi Author,
Congratulations on rolling out the release candidate and thanks for being open to feedback for the last few months.
Releasing the alpha version a few months ahead of the production release has has been prudent and gave good lead time to experiment and share feedback. Early migration guidelines and the tool were especially helpful. Same for earlier release notes which used to accompany only the production releases in the past, what created some information gap during Betas.
As already mentioned, we found replacing the handle system too dramatic and source compatibility breaking. After several weeks of attempts and failures we are now gradually moving off the handles in our code in favor of boost::intrusive_ptr (which interoperates nicely with handles).
Dropping CDL was a good overdue thing so glad this happened at last. Same for cmake.
We are sensitive to changes in visualization. Some issues (like #27188/#26940) were nice to discover working out of the box. Some now prevent what we could do in the past (like more direct access to elements of the 3D view for custom rendering), so we are investigating work-arounds.
We were initially concerned about several performance drops during Beta updates (apparently due to #24682 and alike, i.e. B-Splines cache moves). This change can still potentially provoke some performance drops in the algorithms based on intensive use of curves (not adaptors) but we seem to be able to navigate through this.
Overall this was the most time-consuming migration ever. But I am cautiously optimistic this will be a good foundation for further improvements.
Thank you and all the team for hard work. Keep it up!
Commenter-1