[Bf-taskforce25] Complete Rewrite

[Jonathan Merritt]

Hi Joe,

On 22/03/2009, at 4:36 AM, joe wrote:
> That is called Maya.  It's slow as hell and takes easily 5 times the  
> RAM blender does. :)
>
> Using C for an app like Blender is necessary, since you can't get  
> the same RAM/speed out of most other languages.  Some of them can  
> compile to native code, but that doesn't mean they're as fast; a  
> high-level object-oriented language tends to have overhead from both  
> the garbage collection and the object model implementation.  Python  
> is especially bad this way, but so is java, and it's been optimized  
> to hell.

I agree with most of what you're saying (esp. regarding memory use),  
but in my experience, Java (Sun's JVM with hotspot) has been  
performing about as well as C for numerical computation for some time  
now.  There is a bit of contention surrounding this topic, since it  
does partly depend on CPU cache usage, etc., and also on the C  
compiler used.  But you paint the picture that Java is horrendously  
slow, which simply isn't the case any more:
     http://blogs.sun.com/dagastine/entry/java_is_faster_than_c
     (that partisan blog post is from 2006)

Groups at CERN and NIST have invested time in developing Java  
numerical libraries and applications.  Although numerical Java still  
has very little traction, it is being used successfully.

Still, all of this is an academic discussion because Blender's current  
code base is in C already! :-)

Jonathan Merritt.