A compilation technique to increase X3D performance and safety

As virtual worlds grow more and more complex, virtual reality browsers and engines face growing challenges. These challenges are centered on performance on one hand (an interactive framerate is always required) and complexity on the other hand (the larger and more articulated a virtual world, the more immersive the experience). The usual implementation of an engine or browser for running virtual worlds features an object-oriented architecture of classes. This architecture is a source of often underestimated overhead in terms of dynamic dispatching, and dynamic lookups by scripts when they try to access portions of the scene are both costly and possible sources of mistakes. In this paper we discuss how we have tackled the problem of increasing performance in X3D browsers while also making scripts safe. We have used a compilation technique that removes some overhead and which allows us to introduce safety for scripts that access the state. © 2012 ACM.