From: Phlip <phlip_cpp@...>
Date: 2001-11-18T16:08:17+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:25744] Re: ANN: Ruby Fractal Life Engine

Phlip wrote:

> Rubizens:
> 
> Flea is a complete rewrite of the R3 Fractal engine LPARSER (based on the
> book /The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants/) into this newsgroup's favorite
> language.

This is a reply to a private e-mail; the addy bounced, but my reply is 
hardly personal ;-)

> That's so cool!  I was going to do this myself but
> hadn't even started yet. 

You weren't itching to prove ExtractAlgorithmRefactor
to the XP community. That technique (which I invented)
made the rewrite a slam-dunk.

> Is Ruby fast enough?  I
> expected that it would be but didn't get a chance to
> try it myself.

The Ruby source is not yet fast enough, but if Alan
Kay could have invented the original windowing UI
entirely in Smalltalk I don't doubt I'l tune this up.
There are a number of bottlenecks under my eye right
now; the combinatorial complexity now sadly explodes
at around 5 branches recursed 15 deep.

The slowest link is, of course, povray, which is why
I'm trying to develop alternative backends.

Better, LPARSER abstracted its back ends using the
"Scattered IF Statement Antipattern". I threw them all
away except povray, but after building Flea I
refactored to permit pluggable back-ends, and soon I'l
try to make an OpenGL backend.

But right now I'm taking a break to just play with it
;-)

(BTW I always thought the Big Kids like Pixar would
have their own closed-source in-house plant growing
engines.)

This Ruby newsgroup-list server mirror is kind of a
pain. Please reply to pplumlee at celterra dot com if the
mail's actually to me. Thanks!

        http://sourceforge.net/projects/flea/

-- 
Phlip

http://www.greencheese.org/LucidScheming