On 7/14/07, Andrew Coppin
The "Haskell ray tracer" seems to be a pretty standard and widely-used example program. But has anybody ever seriously tried to make a "production-grade" implementation? (I.e., one that is user-friendly, efficient, and with lots of functionallity.)
I'm not very hopeful about writing a "production-grade" ray tracer completely in Haskell. In my experience, "production-grade" rendering is always banging up on the limit of how much RAM you have on your machine. This is the worst case scenario for garbage collection and you really need very explicit management of memory. (Or you could write in very unidiomatic Haskell but I'm not sure that would buy you anything over other languages.) But I don't think that means there is no role for Haskell in rendering. Examples of places I think Haskell could play a role are: the shader language, procedural geometry generation, the scene description language, and overall scripting of the render (because "production-gared" renders are rarely a simple matter of having a 3D scene description and rendering it). And using Haskell as a shader language doesn't necessarily mean Haskell code runs at render time - Haskell could spit out, say, C code (and/or Cg code). BTW If you're interested in "production-grade" graphics, you shouldn't limit yourself to ray tracing. Renderers such as Renderman and Mental Ray ray trace, but they also both rasterise. Really you want both at the same time.