Re: [Caml-list] What does Jane Street use/want for an IDE? What about you?

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Wednesday 05 November 2008 15:55:24 Kuba Ober wrote:
> Would it be useful, then, to have Smoke have a built-in renderer for
> embedded/non-accelerated platforms? It should still be faster than Mesa,
> since you can work with higher-level objects that can perhaps be drawn
> faster with object-specific rendering functions, instead of having
> to tesselate everything and then just work on triangles?
>
> I'm pretty sure that such built-in rendering would perform better and
> have smaller footprint for non-accelerated platforms than going through
> the whole OpenGL stack.
>
> What do you think?

Smoke already runs fine using Mesa and Mesa is still seeing huge performance 
improvements, e.g. using run-time generated code via LLVM. If you desperately 
needed Smoke on an embedded platform, I would just port it to OpenGL ES 
instead of reinventing the wheel.

> Then, there's still a whole lot of work in getting OCaml interoperate
> with native platform (think OLE, browser plugins, yada yada).

I would opt for the loosest available binding, e.g. sending XML over sockets, 
and avoid native code FFI in OCaml for anything high-level at all costs.

-- 
Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e