[Haskell-cafe] announce: Glome.hs-0.3 (Haskell raytracer)

[Evan Laforge]

>  I've ended up writing something more like POV-Ray than OpenRT, and that's
> fine with me.  I'd rather have something that's slower but more expressive
> than fast but inflexible.  (The former is also perhaps more easily
> attainable, particularly in Haskell.)

Not knowing anything about raytracing, one of the things I found
interesting about the paper was that he claimed that the speedups were
from using coherent ray packets, and that the shader model was
orthogonal, and enough much is spent raycasting that the shader code
to make much difference.  The implication was that you could graft a
packet style raycasting engine onto even povray and give it a nice
speed boost... though you might have to lose the nifty "real" shapes
to tessellated approximations.

Is this accurate?  True but reality is more complicated?