Raytracing in Smalltalk

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Wed Oct 15 09:46:46 UTC 2003


Torsten.Bergmann at phaidros.com wrote:

>David Buck (author of DKBTrace, basis for POVRay) has written 
>a simple raytracer in Smalltalk (VisualWorks) and published
>the code.
>
>If anyone is interested in it:
>
>http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/buck/blogView?showComments=true&ent
>ry=3243310836
>
By the way, in case anyone is interested:

On my machine, the Squeak port renders David's 640x480 sample image in 
174 seconds.  VisualWorks renders the same image in 72s.  So VisualWorks 
is about 2.5x as fast as Squeak at this.

David claims that POVRay's optimized C code is in turn 4x faster than 
his VisualWorks code.  Which should mean that Squeak is 1/10th the speed 
of POVRay.

Not bad, IMO.



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