Carl Witty wrote:
On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 21:50 -0500, Gregory Maxwell
wrote:
On 11/14/06, Carl Witty
<cwitty(a)newtonlabs.com> wrote:>
Um. I promise that Game of Life will not be a problem. I've coded a
game of life simulation in freeking qbasic on a 286 which was faster
than the screen refresh rate.
Using what size grid? Would it have been that fast on Paul Rendell's
Game of Life Turing Machine (1714 x 1647 cells)? What if you want to
run much faster than the screen refresh rate ("what will this pattern
look like after a million generations")?
Then you use a Hashlife algorithm, which is complex enough that it's not
something you want just anybody to edit (and most people wouldn't want
to edit it anyway). So you (find someone to) write it any way you like,
in the most efficient manner you can think of, and then have it audited
and included as a trusted component (and accept the blame if there are
any penises hidden in it).
If you require that Java code be heavily audited, and
that interpreted
code only needs to be lightly audited, and if your supply of people
willing and capable of doing heavy auditing is limited, then you'll end
up with slower code than if you allow lightly audited Java code.
However, the supply of people capable of writing the kind of high
performance code where the interpreter would really be a major
disadvantage is also limited. So yes, the auditing would be a
bottleneck, but it might not be _the_ bottleneck.
(Of course, anyone can write code that runs slowly. Very few people,
however, can write code that not only does something slow, but really
can't be made any faster except by switching to a lower level language.)
--
Ilmari Karonen