Hi,

Nicolas Cannasse seems to believe that "productivity"
and "performance" are orthogonal concepts. They are
not always. For some tasks the performance of the
algorithm determins if the program can be put into the
application. Hence, if the program executes too
slowly, the program is useless and the time spent on
it was a waste. In other words, there was no
productivity at all.

I commend Nicolas for trying to use O'Caml in a games
setting. We, however, can not afford this - instead
the company designed and implemented a specific
language in order to be able to optimize _and_ be
productive. This language has high-level constructs as
well as low-level constructs --- and they can be
freely mixed.

Take care,

PKE.



--- Nicolas Cannasse <warplayer@free.fr> wrote:
> > Some proponents of this mailing list seem to be
> > convinced that Ocaml is so much more productive
> than
> > C++. I find this to be a terrible mistake. From an
> > industry where performance is crucial (games
> > programming), I find quite a few aspects of Ocaml
> hard
> > to unify with productivity.
> 
> You're mistaking "productivity" and "performances".
> Theses are two concept
> which are not compatible... You can either target
> performance, by working
> alot on the optimization of your code, on you can
> target productivity
> without caring about performance...
> OCaml is perhaps one of the best language around to
> acheive both goals at
> the same time with a reasonable ratio. You gain a
> lot of productivity ( 1:3
> compared to C/C++ , in the domain of high-level game
> scripting ) for a few
> loss of performances.
> 
> You have to design your game engine to fit OCaml
> good/weak points. I choose
> to write a 3D Engine entirely in C/C++ - based on
> DirectX8 - with a small
> high-level interface with OCaml, which encapsulate
> Matrix and Quaternions
> into shadow types to enable C optimized operations
> on them. Then the rest of
> the game ( which is : manipulation of complexes data
> structures ) is
> entirely written in OCaml, to enable the maximum
> productivity and SAFETY !
> No more patches needed :)
> 
> Nicolas Cannasse
> www.motion-twin.com
> 


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