Cool... bytecodes and a POV-Ray Virtual Machine...

As a programmer, I'm thrilled with the possibilities. You could 
theoretically compile Nvidia's cg to POV bytecodes and then render it... 
or have a POVMan interface...

Well, back to real life. :-)

Warp wrote:
> Philippe Lhoste <Phi### [at] gmxnet> wrote:
> 
>>Note: I have seen in the PoV-Ray VFAQ that binary format (it was for mesh
>>files) was out of question
> 
> 
>   It's not out of question. It's just difficult to make it so that it will
> work without problems in any system where POV-Ray has been ported. The
> biggest problem is endianess, and a minor problem is different floating
> point formats (which is actually a major problem in the case that the
> format is different; but I consider it minor here because virtually all
> practical computers use the same floating point format).
> 
>   As for the binary povray format, it's not good to make a kludged format
> which is just a pov-file in binary format. It just makes the files smaller,
> without any other benefits.
>   The correct way to go is the to change the POV-Ray parser completely.
> It should work like perl: It first byte-codes the source file to memory
> and then it interpets this byte code (the function parsing already does
> this; it just needs to be extended to everything). The main reason for
> doing this is speed: If the source has lots of loops, macros, etc, the
> speed increase could be enormous compared to the current speed.
>   After this is done, it should be easy to just make a raw dump of the
> bytecode to a file. This file will then be the binary format. Reading
> this file will then be extremely easy: Just read the entire file to memory
> and start interpreting. This saves the parsing stage, which can be really
> slow.
>

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