Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> Fa3ien <fab### [at] yourshoesskynetbe> wrote:
> > And if the shader language is, in fact, an existing language, like C or Ruby,
> > or any smart choice, making use of POV-Ray-specific classes, efficient
> > compilation shouldn't be a problem (I think).
>
>   There's a difference between something being inside the core C++ codebase,
> and something JIT-compiled at runtime.
>
>   Modern C++ compilers are quite good at optimizing, and it would be quite
> hard for the JIT-compiler of any given scripting language to match that
> level of optimization.
>
>   Even if some JIT-compiler of some scripting language would achieve the
> same speeds, the C++ compiler still has some advantages, such as being
> able to inline certain functions for added speed (which naturally cannot
> be done with JIT-compiled functions because they are unknown at the core
> code compilation stage). Not that this matters a whole lot, but still.
>
> --
>                                                           - Warp

I agree with Warp, with the following remarks:

-) We do not need that much speed for parsing, and if this allows us to meet
our requirements (object-orientedness and object-oriented notation, modules,
user-defined classes & methods, addons & new features,  user-definable
stuff, etc ...), we can sacrify some speed for it.

-) We need maximum computation power at render time. What are the quickest
langages for heavy computations? Basically, C++ is quick and very popular
among programmers (hackers or in industry) and benefits a lot of stuff.
FORTRAN (yes, I dared!) is also quick and takes better advantage of
vectorized computations and of processor pipelines, specialized in maths,
still very used in the industry yet much less popular, and benefits also a
lot of stuff.

-) What are the current langages supporting JIT? What are their
performances?

-) What are the langages which are best cross-platform and OS-independent?

Maybe we can make a round and see what we have at our disposal that is
likely to satisfy us for what we want.


    Bruno

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