[Bf-cycles] OpenShadingLanguage Questions

[Thomas Dinges]

Hey Brecht,
Can you tell me what are the benefits of the Open Shading Language?
I mean, I know that it is a shading Language and only runs only on the 
CPU (thats why we have SVM for the GPU).

But I am wondering, is Rendering with OSL faster? Has it a better 
quality? Or is it only beneficial when we can use self written shaders 
in the future?

Building OSL on windows is not fun atm, they have not optimized it for 
that yet, but I also could not get it to build on Ubuntu x64. Could you 
tell me some tips how to compile OSL on Ubuntu x64 for Cycles?

Thanks.
Best regards,
Thomas

-- 
Thomas Dinges
Blender Developer, Artist and Musician

www.dingto.org