Is Bullet suited to hard real time?

[jstolarz]

Hello,
I've been playing with Bullet for a little while now investigating it's use for a robotic system. Until now I've been in simulation (purely for collision detection, not physics simulation), but I'd like to move to real hardware. The question has come up, is Bullet truly suitable to be run in a hard real-time environment? For example, during its distance and collision detection algorithms are any calls to malloc/new made?
Thanks,
Jeremy

[Erwin Coumans]

Bullet 2.x has been quite well optimized, but there are occasional memory allocations. All of those can be re-routed to your custom memory allocators, so you can manage this yourself.

Bullet 3.x offers an optimized back-end called Physics Effects, that does no memory allocations at all at run-time. You can preview the implementation of Physics Effects in the branch: http://bullet.googlecode.com/svn/branch ... icsEffects (use svn to export it)

Thanks,
Erwin