Last month I broke the somewhat sad news that Adobe’s Pixel Bender language is being retired, but for a good cause: we can now redirect effort & try other ways to achieve similar goals. To that end, Adobe researchers have teamed up with staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to define Halide, a new programming language for imaging. It promises faster, more compact, and more portable code.
According to MIT News,
In tests, the MIT researchers used Halide to rewrite several common image-processing algorithms whose performance had already been optimized by seasoned programmers. The Halide versions were typically about one-third as long but offered significant performance gains — two-, three-, or even six-fold speedups. In one instance, the Halide program was actually longer than the original — but the speedup was 70-fold.
Hot damn. #progress
Funny that Halide is a traditional Turkish female name. 🙂
[For fast girls? (Sorry, had to be said!) –J.]
Hope to see it soon in After Effects.
Even after an upgrade to CS6, I still don’t see myself using it instead of CS5 – there is too much Pixel Bender involved in my work.