the-ray-tracer-challenge-racket VS raytracer-exp

Yes, the book has both implementations of the required functions (for all the complicated ones you need) and tests all written in pseudocode.

The book is really good. I have a half-finished implementation in F#, and what I find striking is just how close the F# code is to the pseudocode. I have also started an idiomatic port to Racket but have only done the tuples, vector, and point implementations so far. I need to pick these up again.

https://github.com/bmitc/the-ray-tracer-challenge-fsharp

https://github.com/bmitc/the-ray-tracer-challenge-racket

I mean, check this out: https://github.com/bmitc/the-ray-tracer-challenge-fsharp/blo...

I have also worked through pieces of Ray Tracing in One Weekend (what was referenced in this post). They get you going much faster, but the code is written in C++. I found the translation to a functional style was harder (was just using Racket and F#'s mutability features), whereas the way The Ray Tracer Challenge is laid out and specified, I found it much easier to translate to an idiomatic functional style.

I took a bit of time over the summer to familiarize myself with the language by writing a (super simple) ray tracer.

https://github.com/mschaef/rust-rt

After spending as much time lately as I have in Scala and Python, my immediate reaction to Rust was quite positive. Python has performance issues from 1985 and the build ecosystem seems borderline chaotic. (Made me seriously miss Maven, etc.) Scala seems a lot like C++ - an amazing intellectual accomplishment, a great place to spend all of your time, but not so good as a part time language. (I spend a bunch of my time in Scala mentally expanding out shorthand notation the way I might be mentally macroexpanding in a Lisp.)

Rust, in contrast, seems to have struck a nice balance between expressive power and runtime performance. Expressively, it has a lot of what I like about Scala with a syntax that makes more sense to my C-style upbringing. Performance seems to be everything I'd expect from the fully compiled language that it is. (In terms of performance, there's no way Python would've let me get away with some of what I got away with in my Rust ray tracer.)

Given that the language gave such a positive initial impression, the questions I still have are more about what it feels like in the large. ie: Working with a significantly sized team jointly on a codebase that might last 1, 5, 10 or more years. (Even then, I'm pretty optimistic.)