[Gman-toolkit-devel] Shader

[Daniel B. <dac...@pi...>]

	Hi all, 

	Well it looks like gman development is slowing down. I sent in a
patch today that moves us closer to a raytracer, but it's still quite a
ways. I notice that the most important functionality that is still not
there is the shader language. I am assuming that this is because nobody
knows much about writting interpreters (the compiler should be fairly
straight forward, with lexx/bison). 
	So here are my thoughts. I know Pixar uses just in time
compilation, and can do nice things like use MMX/SSE to shade four pixels
at a time. I'd be happy if we could do 1. But it seems like we should
avoid writting a just in time compiler if we can, so what about using gcc?
my understanding is that all languages get compiled to an intermediate
format, which gets compiled/assembled in a machine specific way. Perhaps
we can take advantage of this second stage. The license would be only GPL,
not LGPL, but... at least it's something. Does anyone know anything about
this? Is it feasible? As another alternative we could use straight C code
as out "intermediate form". That would be slow as heck, but I think it
would be relatively fast to implement. 
	I would be much happier if we had a modular, but imperfect
solution that worked than a whole lot of framework and no pretty pictures.
			Daniel