I'm thinking of writing a ray tracer, able to read POV-Ray files, using
Ada or maybe some other language.  Before I get going, does anyone know
of any ray-tracing projects using any up-to-date languages, including
Ada, Oberon, Sather, or others?  Anything but C/C++? 

(I once heard about a raytracer written in Postscript.  Now there's a
strange choice!)


-- 
Daren Scot Wilson
Member, ACM
dar### [at] pipelinecom
www.newcolor.com
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> I'm thinking of writing a ray tracer, able to read POV-Ray files, using
> Ada or maybe some other language.  Before I get going, does anyone know
> of any ray-tracing projects using any up-to-date languages, including
> Ada, Oberon, Sather, or others?  Anything but C/C++? 

Well, I made one in Lisp once if that counts. Unfortunalty my lispsystem
had to allocate a conscell for every floatingpoint operations... so you
can guess how often it had to do a garbage collection.

/ Mathias Broxvall

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I bet that was slow!
-- 
Daren Scot Wilson

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Daren Scot Wilson <dar### [at] pipelinecom> wrote:

> I bet that was slow!

Appart from the GC's it wasn't as slow as one 
(not being a lisp fanatic) would expect. It's 
difficult to determine exactly how fast it was
since it mainly specialised in isosurfaces - that
was *slow* but they do require quite a lot of
computation.... 
Hey, even the "real" isosurface patch is quite 
slow when you specify custom made functions.
Cheers

/ Mathias

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For the month+ since posting my question, I have been installing and
playing with several new compilers.  My language choices are:
   1) Sather-K, which I can't explain why, but I like it
   2) Modula-3, except I  can't get any compilers to work yet
   3) Oberon-2, for which I have two working compilers, but
         certain aspects of the language bother me,
   4) Stick to good ol' C++.   Nah.   It has been referred 
         to as "The COBOL of the '90s".
   5) Ada is out - lack of freeware (or Open Source) compilers
         that actually work.

If anyone has experience with any of these languages besides C++, let me
know.  Of course, I want speed-optimized executables,  but I also want
to cut coding and debugging time.  Any succes stories or failure stories
to tell?

I have a whole bunch of ideas to try, and didn't want to try them on
POV-Ray which is already huge with features.   Among my ideas are
improved optical calculations, greater variety of primitive shapes, some
clever extent-testing algorithms, and calculating for human eye
responses and use of scientific color models.  Of course, I'll have my
favorite feature - color dispersion, which I had added to POV-Ray with
pleasing results, but POV-Ray still couldn't do what I wanted.  Most of
all, I just want the joy of starting a new raytracer from scratch, even
if a dozen others have already started their own.

Any features that really kick butt, I'll add into the
soon-to-be-officially-released POV-Ray 3.1.


-- 

Daren Scot Wilson
Member, ACM
dar### [at] pipelinecom
www.newcolor.com
---------------------------
"If we aren't supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?" 
                                            -- unknown

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