it's just a path tracer

Inspiration

After the failure of my original project idea, and my inability to come up with a better idea, I resorted to what I knew... path tracing. I also wanted a project that didn't have too many large dependencies, that I could run an incremental compile on quickly.

What it does

Slowly renders an image

How we built it

This is actually probably the most interesting part of the project.

I have my text editor set to automatically save the source files when I edit them
then I have a program called watchexec which listens to file changes in my working directory
when watchexec sees a source file change it automatically compiles and runs the project
running the project writes to a file image.png which is automatically updated in my image viewer
all in all the round trip from a change in the code to seeing the result is approximately a second (at a low sample rate and resolution)