[Haskell-cafe] Ray tracer

[Dan Piponi]

On 7/15/07, ajb at spamcop.net <ajb at spamcop.net> wrote:
> For the record, I've written 2.5 production shader compilers.  The
> 0.5 was in Haskell. :-)

I may have played with 1.0 of them.

One thing I'd also like to mention about the bigger picture behind
rendering: many artist tools in the graphics world use visual dataflow
programming. This allows bridging the gap between artists and
programmers. These tools include tools for animation, modelling,
compositing and so on. Frequently, the model underlying these tools is
pure, functional and lazy. It was interesting talking to one artist
colleague last week who was pointing out some issues with one such
system he was using. It had a couple of features that he found
slightly counterintuitive. Curiously enough, those features were
precisely where the system he was using failed to be pure. So I can't
help wondering if Haskell might not be a natural fit for such tools.
--
Dan