TeraBit - couldn't you just alloc some memory and then add an offset to the base pointer to get to the next 16-byte aligned boundary, and use that as your base?
In general I agree no languages are perfect and they never will be. Asm was great for speed back in the days of slower CPU's but now that everyone has faster CPU's they just want to get lazy and allow sloppiness to be overcome by brute force. It seems to me computers these days don't appear to run as fast as they really should be given their spec, and I say it's down to the programming.
CPU performance is probably several times better than we realize, if everything were written in assembler we'd experience our computers as much more efficient than they are. But the faster the CPU gets the less urge there is to make sure things are fast. I still try to optimize where possible but I haven't gone the assembler route yet with BlitzMax - mainly because that has to be written for the hardware and isn't so easily cross-platform. But I still see there being some common assembler instructions across platforms and BlitzMax could allow the inlining of that small set of instructions and would then be cross-platform. All CPU's have instructions to move data, do math, logic operations, shifts etc. At least then we would have access to high-speed low-level code as well as high-level stuff at the same time - kinda like the original BlitzBasic.
I never could get into C or any such dirivatives because the code syntax just did not seem intuitive or friendly like BASIC. Okay so I'm not an advanced programmer but I just don't see those languages as really being user-friendly for the most part. Asm isn't viable for bigger applications and it took me several months to just write one graphics library in 68k, I can't image how many years it'd take to do a whole game, and as you rightly said while it can be very fast it can also be very longwinded and more opportunities for bugs.
It looks like we're all heading for higher-level design which is where Mark is taking BRL it seems. The only way we can keep on top of so many advanced technologies and subsystems now is to make the programmer's interface higher-level, hopefully not at the expense of flexibility, which is difficult to do well. We're all heading towards greater abstraction and easier tools and I think we're going to see the mainstream-izing of software creation - `casual software`.
I think BlitzMax has good things going for it but like you say in the graphics department it needs more, both for 2D and 3D. It has OpenGL which is great and the hardware acceleration is a very good thing, but it doesn't have a higher level 3D engine and Max2D is bare minimal in my opinion. So much is left up to the programmer, which may be a good *option* but there should also be higher level tools. I think Mark is going in the right direction but I hope he doesn't make his new platform too generic. BlitzMax is a good foundation for it but it is incomplete unless you can program all your own engine.
In general I agree no languages are perfect and they never will be. Asm was great for speed back in the days of slower CPU's but now that everyone has faster CPU's they just want to get lazy and allow sloppiness to be overcome by brute force. It seems to me computers these days don't appear to run as fast as they really should be given their spec, and I say it's down to the programming.
CPU performance is probably several times better than we realize, if everything were written in assembler we'd experience our computers as much more efficient than they are. But the faster the CPU gets the less urge there is to make sure things are fast. I still try to optimize where possible but I haven't gone the assembler route yet with BlitzMax - mainly because that has to be written for the hardware and isn't so easily cross-platform. But I still see there being some common assembler instructions across platforms and BlitzMax could allow the inlining of that small set of instructions and would then be cross-platform. All CPU's have instructions to move data, do math, logic operations, shifts etc. At least then we would have access to high-speed low-level code as well as high-level stuff at the same time - kinda like the original BlitzBasic.
I never could get into C or any such dirivatives because the code syntax just did not seem intuitive or friendly like BASIC. Okay so I'm not an advanced programmer but I just don't see those languages as really being user-friendly for the most part. Asm isn't viable for bigger applications and it took me several months to just write one graphics library in 68k, I can't image how many years it'd take to do a whole game, and as you rightly said while it can be very fast it can also be very longwinded and more opportunities for bugs.
It looks like we're all heading for higher-level design which is where Mark is taking BRL it seems. The only way we can keep on top of so many advanced technologies and subsystems now is to make the programmer's interface higher-level, hopefully not at the expense of flexibility, which is difficult to do well. We're all heading towards greater abstraction and easier tools and I think we're going to see the mainstream-izing of software creation - `casual software`.
I think BlitzMax has good things going for it but like you say in the graphics department it needs more, both for 2D and 3D. It has OpenGL which is great and the hardware acceleration is a very good thing, but it doesn't have a higher level 3D engine and Max2D is bare minimal in my opinion. So much is left up to the programmer, which may be a good *option* but there should also be higher level tools. I think Mark is going in the right direction but I hope he doesn't make his new platform too generic. BlitzMax is a good foundation for it but it is incomplete unless you can program all your own engine.