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On Tue, 6 Apr 1999 10:16:44 -0700, Ray Gardener <ray### [at] daylongraphics com> wrote:
>
>Nathan Kopp wrote in message <37098AFE.EF824E2D@Kopp.com>...
>
>>
>>Overall, I do think we need kind of plug-in ability, though.
>>Unfortunately, I don't have a solution.
>
>
>Why not just add a simple C compiler to
>POV's parser? The technology's been
>around for eons.
What would it compile to? Bytecode? Machine language? If to machine
language, you'll need some kind of loader to get the code in a place where
it's executable, and you'd have to be able to generate code for any processor
POV is to run on - including x86, 680x0, Sparc, Alpha, and PPC architectures.
If to bytecode, why not just integrate the Java VM and get the JIT stuff too?
Now those who know me know that I'm not a Java zealot. In fact, I've come out
against Java many times in the past few years. But I think this is exactly
what Java was made to do.
I originally thought about embedding a Perl interpreter for the purposes of
doing programmable shaders and primitives. The process for doing so is
well-documented, the nature of Perl sorta requires that source to the plugin
be available (though the nature of Perl also allows for it to be completely
unreadable), and it compiles to bytecode and runs pretty quickly. I don't
know offhand whether the Artistic License is compatible with POVLEGAL or not,
but that's easy enough to check. I don't know whether such a thing would
fall under the "new api" clause, though, so you'd still have to run it by
the POV-Team before distributing it. There is some overhead involved - the
Perl DLL on win32 is about half a meg. Still, that's probably pretty small
compared to a Java VM.
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