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fogleman
pt
Go2015–2018
fogleman / pt

pt

A path tracer written in Go.

10Distinct people
12Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A path tracer written in Go.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

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.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year12 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-01-28 03:42:22 UTC to 2018-09-03 02:33:36 UTC.

02462015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 2 submissions, 5 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2018

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC725
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

2 sources
Sure, I think I can explain some of what people might see in it. Obviously its strengths/weaknesses will depend on what language you compare it to, the article mentioned Java so I'll use that. 1) Value types - in Java if you want an array of objects of a non-primitive type, each one will be individually heap allocated (with some extra per-object overhead) and stored as an array of pointers (may change in Java 10). Go allows objects to be linear in memory with no overhead. 2) Slices everywhere - in Go slices are the default list representation. This allows any API that takes a list of objects to be passed a range of a bigger list, without copying/allocating. 3) Low-latency garbage collector - I believe Go has one of the lowest latency garbage collectors in common use (sub-1ms pauses). I realize Java has several options, but I think Go'
Read the rest
s is lower latency than all but some commercial/exotic ones like Zing. This is not saying the GC is better all around, just on latency. It's also relatively easy to minimize allocations in Go due to value types. 4) Low-overhead concurrency - lightweight tasks with no blocking/non-blocking dichotomy in APIs. But threads can scale up a lot, so this might not be a big benefit depending on the application. 5) Interior pointers - you can lay out structures linearly, and still use interior pointers. Also, you can use them as interfaces without allocating any 'boxed' objects. There's probably more, but these are the things that come to mind right now. Looking back on this list, all of them are performance related. So if an application isn't performance sensitive in any of these ways I guess it would be understandable that someone might not see much in it, compared to a language with a higher learning curve but a lot of conveniences like Kotlin. Things like capitalization don't seem that big an issue though... maybe because Go is a simple language the tooling is already pretty good, and you can easily rename to upper/lower case in an IDE like GoLand. For people unfamiliar with Go and want to see something more than hello world, I think an interesting project to look at is https://github.com/fogleman/pt. It's not enormous but not trivial either and makes use of interfaces, goroutines etc. The author's other projects are great too.
In Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

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