1. engines, graphics & native code
- Posted by Alexander Yakovlev <ayakv at GLASNET.RU> Jan 26, 1997
- 1046 views
Chuck goes: > When I'm pessimistic it's because I don't consider writing a lot of > inline assembler as writing programs in Euphoria. I personally > think that if you have to write the most cumbersome, complicated > parts of a program in assembler, it doesn't say much about your > language of choice. I don't believe Euphoria can handle texture > mapping, a 3d engine and run a game using native code without some > new assembled functions or routines therefore I don't really think > you can do this in *just* Euphoria at least not do it and maintain > any level of speed or gameplay. Of course I'd love to be proven wrong. I have to agree that Euphoria can't handle the overload of textured graphics by itself, but I am not saying that this detracts even a bit from the language or its implementation. After all, Euphoria is an _interpreted_ language, or semi-compled if you like, but its handling of graphics is *very* impressive compared with all other interpreters I have seen. If your instrument of choice is C/C++, TP or any other "macho" language, you _do_ have to resort to coding in assembler. When you have a module done in assembler, you can incorporate it into the code so that it becomes a part of the language and enhances it. Look at the code compiled by the bigname systems and you'll see that it's still the spaghetti code of yesteryear, even if you go to enormous lenghths to optimize it. Low-level programing is an inevitable part of the work. And graphics primitives and "phrases" compiled from them are just yelling to be written in "machine vernacular". Written only once and then reused as part of the language. I sat down this morning to review my preliminary notes on an "Assembler subset" dumb 2-pass preprocessor. Like I say, I'm a casual programmer, I am at a crossroads in my life, I have too much on my hands right now (all this really means that my knowledge of assembler has gotten rusty by now . I can't even get a hard copy of the Euphoria reference file, because I have no printer, and <sob> <sob> <sob>. But I *don't want* any suggestions just yet. I want to (finally) get my real initiation to Euphoria. I love the challenge. Hope it'll work, after a fashion, but it's not gonna be a gem. Don't expect anything worth looking at earlier than in about a month, though. I'm a slowcoach Then you'll have a good laugh at my attempt, and we'll probably have a working version then. Since, A.Y.