William Tracy <wtr### [at] calpolyedu> wrote:
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> Bruno Cabasson wrote:
> > -) What are the current langages supporting JIT? What are their
> > performances?
>
> How about the Java runtime? Sun has already opened up the parts that
> we'd actually need. (We have no use for the Java class libraries, and
> once you strip those out the runtime binaries are only a couple
> megabytes in size.)
>
> > -) What are the langages which are best cross-platform and OS-independent?
>
> Some of the existing Open Source JVMs support more processors than Sun's
> OpenJDK; at the same time, Sun's implementation seems to be better
> optimized on those platforms that are supported.
>
> - --
> William Tracy
> afi### [at] gmailcom -- wtr### [at] calpolyedu

Java provides many of what has been evocated (OO, modularity, JIT,
platform/OS comptibility, etc ..). But how could we take advantage of it
without ending with something too heavy?

Java cannot be the choice for the rendering engine for obvious performance
reasons, but it might be a good candidate for the language/syntax aspect,
provided we can define some restrictions and rules. But I absolutely don't
know what and how ... Alladin's lamp welcome! (Might be a good name for
something, no? You just polish, and something magic comes out!)

Java provides JNI, an interface for external libraries, with the concern
that was evocated earlier in the thread, but which might be a 'ready-made'
solution.

OTOH, I cannot imagine we can do something new and entirey specific from
scratch. It represents way too much work and maturation.

We can (have to) reuse POV syntax, augment it with the new features, keep
the POV spirit. We can write an efficient and powerful rendering engine,
whatever language it is written in, the pure technical/math part is never
much of a problem. And we have some skilled and genius people here. My
opinion is that the difficulty resdes in between, between the syntax itself
and the rendering engine.

In conclusion, we have the following chain:

Features -> Syntax -> Parse and make features take form -> Rendering engine

And the related questions:

WHAT features? (not answered yet, first thing to do)
WHAT syntax? (not answered yet, in conjuction with features)
HOW linguistic features are implemented? (here resides the core problem and
main choices, possibly needs loop-back with features for compromise)
HOW the rendring engine is implemented? (only technical, not easy at all but
not really blocking)

People here can write some significant pieces of code to illustrate features
they have in mind with the syntax they envision, or to show what they would
have liked to have at least once in their POVer's life, and blocked them
more or less. Can we open a new group for that purpose? Or use rather the
povray.programming group?


    Bruno

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