my projects on about me

rust ray tracer

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

what?

good old ray tracer again

why?

earlier last year i followed Ray Tracing in One Weekend and implemented it in go to get a hang of the language. it was all nice and fun but rendering the final scene took arround 20 minutes in my M1 Macbook Air, so i was left feeling a little disatisfied.
i have been solving many kattis problems in rust (particularly those that are just too slow to run in python), and i wanted to try rust on a slightly more complicated ‘project’
i really wanted to see how rust concurrency feels.

conclusions

computer graphics are very hard to debug. really. really. hard. i spent days fixing a very subtle bug.
i started defining a trait ‘hitable’ and was planning to just extend types as i needed them, but as i started testing it, it really wasn’t any faster than the go version. so i decided to replace as many allocations as possible and not use any dynamic dispatch and i think i’m happy with the results. i think rust enums make up for the lack of abstractness in this scenario
rayon is cool and very very simple

todo

lights!
more materials!
more geometries!
textures!
Ray Tracing: The Next Week
Ray Tracing: The Rest of Your Life

mandelrust

Tue, 10 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

what?

i basically wanted to have a random zoom on an interesting mandelbrot point:

-0.761574 + -0.0847596i

why?

i wanted to try out rust in an aws lambda function
i wanted to build that lambda function with cdk (i’m kinda procrastinating from learning/using terraform)
i was kinda hyped to use rust after reading about it

conclusions

i’m starting to dig aws hehe.
i really like rust and will keep using it as much as i can
i will never ever find mandelbrot set uninteresting
rust lambda startup time is unlike anything i’ve ever seen. it draws (for me, at least) the line between server and serverless kinda blurry

todo

well this seems obvious but i don’t want to use a single point and a random zoom but rather a set of interesting points and a random zoom! all this seems kinda time consuming so i guess i’ll leave it like this for a while
i also want to optimize mb allocated for each lambda execution. 128mb takes arround 13 seconds to finish, while 1gb takes arround 3.

update 10-5-2022

i’ve been consuming a lot of terraform content. but as you may know by now, in the realm of programming you learn mostly by getting your hands dirty, so i tried importing (this is the single feature i liked the most) most of the resources i used on cdk and got them up & running in terraform. it is beautiful.

go ray tracer

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

what?

a ray tracer of course! if you are not familiar with the term, it is basically a rendering technique that is very intuitive, and fairly easy to implement naively (and yields very decent results), but tends to be computationally expensive.

why?

back in my Modeling and Programming course, we were asked to implement a ray tracer in order to get one extra credit. back then, though, even fairly easy problems seemed very scary and alien to me (plus, i had a pretty good score already). i came across Ray Tracing in One Weekend recently and i thought i owed it to my old self to get it done as soon as possible.
this should come as not surprise if you’ve read anything i post in this website, but i wanted to see how go felt when programming something bigger than a leetcode problem.

conclusions

this was really really fun. if you haven’t already give it a go (pun intended)! it is supremely well written and if you’re anything like me, you’ll have a blast.
i implemented some very simple concurrency and i’m in awe of how easy goroutines and channels make for concurrent design. (also, i saw this long ago and it was in my mind throughout this project)
i think i’m starting to like go (i mean, it is as simple as it gets). plus generics!.

todo

while making it concurrent and giving it more cores to run in parallel made it significantly faster, i’m still not satisfied by the results. rendering the final scene of the project takes about 15 minutes in my M1 Macbook Air with the full 8 cores. i think i can squeeze some performance by making garbage collector do less work. we’ll see how it goes.
lights!
more materials!
more geometries!
textures!
Ray Tracing: The Next Week
Ray Tracing: The Rest of Your Life

my projects on about me

rust ray tracer

what?

why?

conclusions

todo

links

mandelrust

what?

why?

conclusions

todo

update 10-5-2022

links

go ray tracer

what?

why?

conclusions

todo

links