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...