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ray_one

Raytracing in a weekend - Book One, implemented in Odin-Lang

PLEASE NOTE: While the content is finished, this code base could do with a cleanup. I was working through the book while learning Odin-lang, so there will be inefficiencies and non-idiomatic choices.

Overview

Odin is a programming language that is similar to C and very well suited to graphics programming. I am going through the Raytracing in a weekend book(s) in an effort to try out this language. This is a first attempt, so not being used to the language and what is idiomatic, the result is a little haphazard. I will likely need to revisit this and do some refactoring once I understand the language a bit better.

Raytracer

The following image was produced using a value for samples_per_pixel of 500. This will give a high quality render, but will be very slow.

Alt text

Build and run

This requires Odin to be setup on your machine with the appropriate paths added to the appropriate locations for your machine. I have tested this on Mac M1 and Windows PC - I expect it will work fine on Linux too.

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/cainmartin/ray_one.git

Navigate to the root folder and run the Odin compiler

cd ray_one
odin run src

Odin

Thoughts on Odin-Lang

What I liked:

  • I really like the build system, it's simple and easy to get going
  • Compilation is REALY fast
  • Compile time execution is really cool - I need to dig into this more, but it seems realy powerful
  • Multiple return values are useful and super nice
  • The batteries included nature of the maths / graphics libraries is just awesome

What I didn't like:

  • Sometimes Odin just fails silently, I had a few times the compiler would just not run the build with no errors
  • Some of the syntax takes some getting used to (this is a skill issue mostly)

I enjoyed Odin a lot. It is very C like, it is a pretty ergonomic language, and had some really nice features.

There is a lot of friction going into it though, because the documentation is not great and some of the concepts are not obvious or seem to have multiple ways of achieving the same goal. So it can be hard to work out what is idiomatic code in Odin. You are often left with the feeling that you might be creating a rod for your own back with decisions you make now, due to a lack of guidance.

I do find C a much simpler language to grok - but Odin is REALLY good. It's easy to use, build process is simple and it's really powerful. I will come back to this language.

Odin can be found here:

https://odin-lang.org