Taking an object-oriented view of accelerators

It was almost a decade ago that accelerator experts were introduced to the concept of object-oriented programming. This new methodology was expected to play a key role in solving various software problems. Today, there seems be nothing that prevents us from taking advantage of this new technology. In fact, we are often forced to catch up with the computer industry's new standard. This is especially true for graphics programming. While evaluating the benefits of using this new technology, we must also evaluate whether it is as effective as it was claimed. In this paper, we discuss these issues based on experiences at the Advanced Light Source.