[Bf-committers] How about adding boost uBLAS library toblender/extern?

[Yves Poissant]

From: "joe" <joeedh at gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, January 26, 2009 5:18 AM


> Ugh, porting the render code to c++ would be a really bad idea.  It's
> highly optimized for C.

I wonder what this "optimizition for C" really means. The renderer is very 
far from fast and thus certainly far from optimized in one way or another. 
It might be optimized for C but I think the rendering pipeline itself needs 
some fundamental conceptual revision. Just optimizing C statements does not 
cut it and some old C optimization tricks are actually detrimental to modern 
CPU architectures. And given that C++ is a superset of C, any C optimization 
trick that are actually efficient could be ported to C++ as well.

I suggest that porting the renderer to C++ might be beneficial even if not 
totally "optimized for C" if some other aspects can be optimized such as the 
vector/matrix and color calculations. At least, that might be the first step 
to a gradual refactoring of the renderer. That just said, I believe that a 
more profound refactoring than simply porting or improving is needed.

Just for my own education, I would like to be pointed to some of those C 
optimization tricks in Blender renderer that could not be ported to C++.

---

The Eigen2 library looks very interesting. Very, very interesting.

Yves