Harvard vs. vonNeuman

[Deano Calver]

Modern graphics drivers have a complete compiler, linker and 
pre-processor built-in (GLSL). Also lots of D3D games link with D3DX 
which has the complete HLSL language system.

GLSL ships with every Windows graphics driver for NVIDIA, ATI and 3D 
Labs and soon will ship with most Linux, Freebsd systems (DRI/MESAGL) 
and Apple (actually may be shipping already) systems.

Of course people aren't used to the idea that there graphics chips have 
significantly more programmable floating point power than there CPU. So 
only games programmers get to use all that wasted power (its in the 
order of 50-100 GFLOPS currently, should pass a TFLOP in 5 years).

David V. Corbin wrote:

> 
>As many of you have pointed out there have been tools for generating
>programs from within programs for a long time. There have also been many
>programming environments which did not need a complete compiler. 
>
>To the best of my knowledge, the Microsoft .NET platform is the first
>run-time environment [not development environment] in which a compiler,
>linker and all of the associated capabilities are included. If you have a
>windows machine [XP, 2K] and have applied the windowsupdates, then all of
>these tools are already resident on your machines!
>
>
>  
>