Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote...
>   I still think that some type of byte-compiling of the povray script
> before parsing it would speed up parsing a lot.
>   What I mean is that povray could work as perl does (AFAIK): First it
> reads the script and byte-compiles it to a binary format, which is kind
> of "machine code" or "assembler" into memory. Then it interprets this
> byte code.

The "byte-code", ususally called "p-code", is also very similar to what Java
does (.java is compiled into .class).  Remember that this p-code does still
have to be interpreted, but the interpretation of p-code is relatively
quick.

It would not be practical to compile to true machine code, since that would
require a platform-specific compiler to exist inside POV (and I think I can
saftely say that currently nobody on the POV-Team wants to attempt such a
feat while).  (Plus, you'd run into all sorts of problems with
cross-platform compatibility, program bloat, etc. etc.)

-Nathan

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