Ray tracer language comparison

We benchmarked five progressively optimised versions of our cut-down ray tracer written in C++, Java, OCaml and SML. Joe Marshall, Nathan Baum, Juho Snellman, Jeffrey Siskind, Lennart Augustsson and others have kindly ported the programs to Common Lisp, Scheme and Haskell.

Benchmark

The discussion of this benchmark is split into five sections:

Benchmark description and source code (updated 1st December 2007)
Results (updated 1st December 2007)
Discussion: Verbosity
Discussion: Performance
Conclusions

Links

The following webpages are derived from this work:

For a thorough introduction to OCaml, read our book "OCaml for Scientists"
Our original ray tracer
Our line-by-line C++ vs OCaml comparison of this ray tracer
Our line-by-line C++ vs SML comparison of this ray tracer
Our raytrace benchmark in the Computer Language Shootout
Thierry Berger-Perrin's optimised C++ based upon our ray tracer
Our ray tracer has also been discussed at length on the internet. For example:
Many thanks to those people who posted productive comments, constructive criticisms or their own conversions of our ray tracer on the internet. With the help of other people, we shall include translations to other languages in the future.
Our ray tracer has been used as a test of several new languages as well:
- Factor: a practical stack language
- IO
- K in 7 lines of code!

This work was inspired by the excellent book "An Introduction to Ray Tracing" by Andrew S. Glassner.

Disclaimer

The author of this work (Jon Harrop) has considerably more experience in C++ and OCaml than in Java, SML, Lisp and Scheme. Although every effort has been taken to make this study impartial, it cannot be expected to be completely unbiased.

The notion of verbosity is inherently subjective. Our use of lines of code (LOC) and bytes is clearly imperfect. However, we have tried to adhere to reasonable (but succinct) coding styles in order to make the results meaningful.

Next: Benchmark