PJpjmlp·Jan 10, 2022Submission
Performance comparison of ray tracing in functional programming languages
2 points · Open discussionathas
raytracers
Futhark2020–2022
athas / raytracers
raytracers
Performance comparison of parallel ray tracing in functional programming languages
5Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
310GitHub stars
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Performance comparison of parallel ray tracing in functional programming languages
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by month6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-04-13 12:14:33 UTC to 2022-01-10 18:40:46 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 2020 | 2020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| May 2020 | 2020-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2020 | 2020-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2020 | 2020-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| Aug 2020 | 2020-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2020 | 2020-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2020 | 2020-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2020 | 2020-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2020 | 2020-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2021 | 2021-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2021 | 2021-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2021 | 2021-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2021 | 2021-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2021 | 2021-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2021 | 2021-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2021 | 2021-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2021 | 2021-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2021 | 2021-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2021 | 2021-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2021 | 2021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesIf you're interested to see a comparison of parallel programming in a number of functional languages check this repo out [0]. It includes multicore OCaml, parallel MLton (but not Poly/ML, which has been around and parallel longer), Haskell, Futhark, F#, Scala, and Rust.
Credit to Sam Westrick for turning me on to this [1].
[0] https://github.com/athas/raytracers
[1] https://twitter.com/shwestrick/status/1480587660691480579
In OCaml Multicore merged upstreamThe author claims to do research on optimizing compilers but fails to mention in the readme that running the Scala benchmarks with GraalVM (a different optimizing compiler) eliminated the need for most low-level tweaks (including the double precision tweak that is still mentioned in the readme) https://github.com/athas/raytracers/pull/21
In Parallel ray tracing benchmark for functional programming languagesParallel ray tracing benchmark for functional programming languages
96 points · Open discussionSome months ago, I used my lockdown time to make a repository containing implementations of a (bad) ray tracer in various parallel functional programming languages[0]. I was quite happy that someone contributed a multicore OCaml implementation[1]. I think the most interesting part was the series of pull requests where an expert (I think even a multicore OCaml contributor) significantly improved the performance of the ray tracer [2,3,4]. I think being able to see the individual steps is valuable, because functional programming has long promised "effortless parallelism", and hence it is enlightening to see how different well-optimised parallel functional code is from an original more or less idiomatic sequential implementation. In OCaml's case, I don't think the difference is all that great. Most of the improvements came from using a l
Read the rest
ibrary that provides a proper task pool, since "multicore OCaml" on its own seems to just provide relatively low-level (but very well implemented) primitives. It's a little bothersome that the programmer has to manually provide a chunk size, rather than letting the runtime figure such things out on its down, but it's not terrible. It was far more annoying that multicore OCaml is (or was) missing functions for measuring wall clock time...
Although there was a later PR that improved performance 40% just by moving code around to minimise allocations... [5] Unfortunate that such minor changes can have such dramatic impact.
[0]: https://github.com/athas/raytracers
[1]: https://github.com/athas/raytracers/tree/master/ocaml
[2]: https://github.com/athas/raytracers/pull/4
[3]: https://github.com/athas/raytracers/pull/5
[4]: https://github.com/athas/raytracers/pull/6
[5]: https://github.com/athas/raytracers/pull/7
Performance comparison of parallel ray tracing in functional languages
6 points · Open discussion