v8 is too slow for my purpose

Question

I'm working on a music visualization plugin for libvisual. It's an AVS clone -- AVS being from Winamp. Right now I have a superscope plugin. This element has 4 scripts, and "point" is run at every pixel. You can imagine that it has to be rather fast. The original libvisual avs clone had a JIT compiler that was really fast, but it had some bugs and wasn't fully implemented, so I decided to try v8. Well, v8 is too slow running the compiled script at every pixel. Is there any other script engine that would be pretty fast for this purpose?

Answer 1

sounds like you need to use native code, or maybe a Java Applet (Not that I recommend a Java Applet, use it only if you are in full control over the client environment).

Answer 2

If you are running your updates on a per-pixel level, I would suggest having an off-screen in-memory representation of the screen, and update the screen as a whole, not each individual pixel. I know that this is a common issue for bitmap updates in general, not V8 per-se. I don't know enough about the specific environment you are working in to be much help, only that as I said, it's a common performance issue to try to update individual pixels against a UI canvas one at a time. If you can do an offline/offscreen representation of your canvas/ui surface then update it all at once, your performance will be much better.

Also, there will be some dependencies on how your event model is worked out. If this doesn't work well, you may need to bring this logic into a compiled COM object or something, but on a per-pixel update scheme, you will have similar issues when trying to do per-pixel updates. Not saying you are, just noting again this is the most common issue with this type of problem.