I'm well aware that there are complaints about speed, and the topics of parallel
processing and gpu have been addressed.
I'm also aware that SDL is not a compiled language.
This is a legitimate inquiry (sprinkled with White whine) to further educate
myself and the non-POV-team/developer community.



Just for my own information, I'm wondering why POV-Ray is so painfully slow to
process non-rendering information (parse time).

I'm asking, because I converted some of Paul Nylander's Mathematica code for the
reaction-diffusion algorithm to SDL, and although I knew beforehand that it has
a fair amount of looping through a 'large' array (160x120), I was still somewhat
amazed and dismayed that it was as slow as it was.

This is thrown into even starker contrast when I run the reaction-diffusion code
from Coding Challenge into Processing - which somehow manages to crank out
results on a 700 x 500 grid at 60 frames per second (that's what's in the code,
and the default speed - no idea if this is actual)
I'm pretty sure Processing is as high a level language as SDL, and it's not
compiled... so what IS the difference?

Is there some sort of bottleneck or fundamental reason that the programmatic
handling of data is so slow in comparison to other languages?

Thanks

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