What's your favorite language, and why?

[apatriarca]

I personally like Haskell because of its elegance and purity. But I usually use C++ or C# to make the majority of my programs.

[Zooch]

How long have you guys been using C++? And lua?

[Adrir]

Originally Posted by DTR

It just feels frustrating with Java and co' when no matter what algorithm you choose, no matter how you try optimizing your code, you will always be limited by the language itself. Sure, you can make things fast. Very fast. But still, never reaching the "optimal" execution speed.

Hehe, that's what one of our old lecturers said about going to C and C++ from Assembly.

[Gshonk]

Originally Posted by Zooch

How long have you guys been using C++? And lua?

A little more than 3 years for C++. I have only looked at Lua a little.

[Tetragrammaton]

Originally Posted by DTR

It just feels frustrating with Java and co' when no matter what algorithm you choose, no matter how you try optimizing your code, you will always be limited by the language itself. ( Sure, you can make things fast. Very fast. But still, never reaching the "optimal" execution speed.

So you program in assembly?

[DTR]

Originally Posted by Tetragrammaton

So you program in assembly?

Umm, actually I do, but thats beside the point :P

Small costs here and there form a huge river.
Array index check here.
Garbage collection there.

Just for the record, I recently wrote a basic raycaster in java just for the fun of it. Nothing fancy. The everyday symmetrical grid based thingy.

Decided to use Java2D trusting that it might just be effective enough...

Lo and behold. Profiling reveals that 95% of the execution calls consists of raster array manipulations, scaleImages and drawImages.
(Managed to eliminate scaleImage calls alltogether by somesort of caching class, but that did not do much).

The thing works nicely in resolutions under 640 x 480. However, squeezing any more than 15 fps from resolutions above that mark proved difficult.

The walls render well enough, but the darn ceiling and floor casting takes insane amounts of

raster.setElem(indx, color);

Not only is it a method call, but most certainly there is also an array indexing happening inside the thing.

So here I am paying for:

method call spiced with passing of 2 params.
+ possible unwanted array index checkup

Doubt the memory cache likes this type of foolery very much. At least the fps stays ridiculously low with hundreds of thousands of individual bloated operations.

go Java!

[yaustar]

Originally Posted by DTR

Decided to use Java2D trusting that it might just be effective enough...

That's a problem with the library, not the language.

[DTR]

Originally Posted by yaustar

That's a problem with the library, not the language.

That may be so.
Im currently making the thing make use of OpenGL with JOGL instead.

Its not like the array indexing or method calling is going to be significantly less with it.

The fact being that huge majority of time went on floor and ceiling rendering. (drawing the horizontal resolution amount of differently scaled slices was not particulary heavy task)

I wrote the pixels directly into the raster, which I drew at the end of the rendering on screen.

The actual raycasting operation took less than 7 % of the total execution time and I was happy with that.

That one blitting at the end of the rendering just cant have been that consuming, unlike the constant array operations assigning pixel values.

I just have a feeling that the performance is not going to increase too much with OpenGL....

But should it do so, well. I would ge glad.

[yaustar]

Can't you turn off the array bounds check when you compile it?

[DTR]

Originally Posted by yaustar

Can't you turn off the array bounds check when you compile it?

I have read a few sources on the internet about the thingy, and it definately does not seem practical.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CatchDontCheck

Suggestions range from abusing try{}catch() to using array.length as the loops cap value have been suggested.

For me it seems as if the thing works much like the garbage collector. If works if the compiler so pleases without asking many questions.

Only reason I chose java for the task anyway was the crossplatfom compatibility and the apparently faster prodution speed.