CHchunkyks·Oct 10, 2022
Every time I see someone's off-piste raytracer project, I feel compelled to link my own silly contribution to that diaspora: https://github.com/chunky/sqlraytracer
In Ray Tracing in Notepad.exe at 30 FPS (2020)chunky
sqlraytracer
PLpgSQL2021–2025
chunky / sqlraytracer
sqlraytracer
Everyone writes a Raytracer eventually. This is mine.
3Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
292GitHub stars
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What it is
Everyone writes a Raytracer eventually. This is mine.
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:04:58 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year9 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-08-21 20:36:40 UTC to 2025-12-23 03:08:42 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesThis feels like an opportunity to link my own, much sillier, raytracer: https://github.com/chunky/sqlraytracer
In GPU ray tracing tutorial – 10 articlesNice! APL-family languages are really great at this kind of thing; I should see how small I can squinch a raytracer with just NumPy. Stevan Apter's programs (like that one) constantly make me wish I knew K: even if I don't want my code to look like that, it seems like it would be great to be able to type it in that way.
That also leads to a one-page OCaml version and a two-page C++ version by Jon D. Harrop (the Flying Frog guy), both also using PPM output and rendering only spheres, much like most of my examples: https://web.archive.org/web/20070605173709/http://www.ffcons...
He also wrote an SML version https://web.archive.org/web/20070522030632/http://www.ffcons... and a Java version, and others ported it to Scheme and Common Lisp https://web.archive.org/web/20070515185350/http://www.ffcons..., those these seem to be lost now.
Still o
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thers ported it to Io http://mike-austin.com/io/ray.io and Factor https://github.com/factor/factor/blob/master/extra/benchmark... (3 pages).
In https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=83222 Holtsetio wrote a raytracer in two pages of MySQL SQL, but it's sort of obfuscated. It emits the output in BMP format (almost as simple as PPM) and uses lots of imperative MySQL extensions to SQL, and it ended up as 10 KiB instead of the 1 KiB of my Clojure version. But it handles triangles, not just spheres, so it can render the Stanford bunny.
https://github.com/chunky/sqlraytracer/blob/master/raytracer... is instead about three pages of SQL, using recursive CTEs instead of imperative assignments, and supporting only spheres but with different materials, like my C version. He's using recursive CTEs as implemented in Postgres: compliant with ANSI SQL but not implemented in most other SQL engines. In particular, he started out with SQLite but it wasn't strong enough.
This is awesome. A bit of self-promotion: I, too, wrote a deliberately obtuse raytracer: https://github.com/chunky/sqlraytracer
In Ray Tracing for the TI-84 CE