Re: [Mesa3d-dev] dynamic code generation with gcc

[Josh V. <ho...@na...>]

"Stephen J Baker" <sj...@li...> writes:

> The "average" system with a 700MHz CPU also has a kick-ass graphics
> card that makes this discussion largely irrelevent.  If software-only
> rendering has any kind of a future at all, it's in PDA's, phones and
> internet-capable toasters...where the overhead of having a compiler
> on board at all (let alone actually running it on anything) tends to
> be unacceptable.

Gareth brought up software rendering.  While I think Gareth's dynamic
software renderer design could benefit from compiling at run time, I
was thinking more about functions that are currently implemented with
template header files.  They are usually named "*tmp.h" and are used
in both hardware and software rendering.  If Mesa could compile new
functions at run time, you could cover more special cases without
bloating the library with functions that are never called.

As for the toaster running Mesa, you might find out that the
Mesa+compiler package is SMALLER than normal Mesa.  Removing all the
special case template functions could reduce the size of Mesa enough
to offset the size of a compiler.

Josh