And indeed it is pretty impressive how fast the rendering happens given that the code operates at such lower level... Even selecting the color of every pixel requires non trivial work in the inner loop.
AWESOME code.
"Code is awful due to the nature of the project"
All this using nothing more than a frame buffer, so you could port this easily from a C64 to any other computer. This code contains a lot of knowledge VS use of pre-build APIs.
If a programmer reads this code and understands how every part works, he or she ends knowing a lot more about computer graphics than before.
It contains a lot of general knowledge about 3D graphics, and absolutely 0 specific knowledge about the environment in which it's running. All he's accomplished by doing it this way is show off that he knows trig and prevent any of it from being hardware accelerated.
>If a programmer reads this code and understands how every part works
But he never will, because the code is illegible.
low level = close to hardware, high level = high abstraction, like JS
Javascript is high level, but here notch is using it as a low level framebuffer.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but wouldn't you normally expect low level code, whilst more time consuming to write, be faster or just as fast as higher level code.
For example, how C is used as a standard for fast code since it's so low level.
However if you use this approach in Javascript you get poor performances unfortunately. And indeed this demo requires fast computers to do what otherwise could be done in C with direct access to the video frame buffer with maybe 50 times slower computers.
Even C coders almost no longer try to do this low level things and let the graphic chip do a lot of the work when the goal is to produce a game.
So in Javascript instead you want to usually call a library that implements a 3D engine in a lower level language like C and with more direct hardware access.
But in this case, it makes sense to do all this in a low level way and in Javascript: it is just a demo that is full of interesting code and with an appealing visual output.
In this case, Notch is writing code that doesn't necessitate the overhead of using JS. It could easily be rewritten as C and probably run faster that way. Not that it isn't interesting, of course.
But he's actually using Javascript arrays which can get passed around inside a javascript VM, and do not have a set size. Not very "low level".
I spent a moment and changed the arrays to Float32Arrays which have set sizes and sit in memory without being fucked with by the VM and sped the demo up dramatically.