A Ray Tracing Adventure

I’ve been entertaining the idea of writing a ray tracer for a while now and last weekend I stumbled across the excellent book “Ray Tracing in One Weekend” by Peter Shirley. I really enjoyed the read and had even more fun following along and implementing it.
I dismissed Peter’s advise to write it in C++ and instead did a Cython implementation. The total implementation is 575 SLOC (excluding whitespace).
I won’t go into all the details of writing the ray tracer (if you are interested, read the book—it’s really accessible and it is only 49 pages). I will however say that after writing the code, it was also interesting to profile the code and find the places where small syntax changes made huge differences in runtime. When a function is executed many millions of times, even small alterations make a big difference. That said, this is still plenty of room for improvement.
My implementation is on github here.
This is the scene you render at the end if you follow along in the book: