William Tracy <wtr### [at] calpolyedu> wrote:
> nemesis wrote:
> > I was thinking... the next Povray supposedly is going to be GPL.  Would you
> > guys find it feasible to ship it together with GCC?  My point is:
> > JIT-compilation is still a relatively new area and there aren't sufficient
> > open-source implementations out there.  But traditional ahead-of-time
> > compilation is easily achieved.  If it was possible for a povray SDL script
> > to be compiled before running, performance wouldn't be a problem any more.
>
> I really can't say how SDL would take to being compiled; I can say that
> GCC is going to be a little bit of overkill for our needs. ;-)
>
> Writing a new GCC frontend for SDL would be a big project in itself.

That's not what I had in mind:  we'd likely ship both GCC (for the backend
compilation) and a front-end language system capable of producing C code
which would in turn get compiled.  Many high level languages today target C
as a lowlevel portable assembly.

I certainly wouldn't like to program SDL in C (nor C++).  My point was to
adapt a particular high-level language to suit the needs of Povray SDL and
program in that subset.  An then, get it compiled to C, which would in turn
get compiled to native code by GCC.  Too much of a trouble?  chicken does it
in a single pass with a high-level script.

> > then, I could even suggest getting a Scheme implementation like chicken to
> > be a possible SDL frontend... :)
>
> If you want to get yourself lynched, sure... ;-)

No need to fear once you get past the parentheses (with proper indentation
and structural editing)...

but then again, perhaps we should stop daydreaming and first help rewrite
all that old C/C++ code...

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