Lasse Penttinen
24 Jul 2002 7:51
John Carmack has welcomed NVidia's decision to open its source compiler technology - but not the actual compiler - for its high-level Cg language.
With competition heating up in the shader wars, NVidia wants to build momentum for Cg, and just in case we miss the point, an accompanying press release tells us that "momentum is increasing in the Developer Community" for Cg.
NVidia is positioning Cg as the "C for graphics". Presumably they don't mean that language prone to pointer errors and memory allocation bugs, with a dodgy run-time library, that takes 15 years to clear an ANSI standard ... but instead is a rich, high level language that removes the need to target low-level hardware card-by-card. (That's what happens when you let marketing people loose on the metaphors).
The Register