[Haskell-cafe] Ray tracer

Andrew Coppin andrewcoppin at btinternet.com
Sun Jul 15 12:54:15 EDT 2007


Philippa Cowderoy wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Jul 2007, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>
>   
>> By "production grade" I don't mean "you can put Pixar to shame", I just mean
>> "it's not an experimental research project - it's something designed to
>> actually be used by normal users".
>>
>>     
>
> Or to put it another way, that the code and UI are appropriate for 
> "production grade" software in general, as opposed to a raytracer that's 
> suitable for production grade rendering.
>   

Well, I don't know - POV-Ray on Unix doesn't have a UI at all. ;-)

On the other hand, it's feature-rich, it's fast (as ray tracers go 
anyway!), it doesn't crash when you try to use it, and it has rich 
documentation. I'd say it's "production-grade".

Similarly, Parsec is something that I'd think of as a "production-grade" 
Haskell library: It goes fast, it works well, and it's nicely documented.

On the other hand, search the Haskell wiki and you'll find plenty of 
"example" ray tracers that probably work, but I doubt they're fast or 
user friendly. They're written to demonstrate how you'd do the thing, 
not to actually do it "for real", if you see what I mean...



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