I wrote a ray tracer in Brainfuck
A programmer recounts their experience writing a ray tracer in Brainfuck, an esoteric programming language with only eight commands. The project was inspired by a desire to explore the limits of simple languages compared to complex modern build systems like CMake.
Why it matters
It highlights the intersection of software engineering philosophy and the pursuit of extreme minimalism in coding practices.
As I was preparing for a systems programming competition in C++, I began to relearn CMake, as Cargo had spoilt me too much in the meantime, and I noticed an interesting claim in the tutorial.
Oftentimes the correct answer is to write a tool in a general purpose programming language which solves the problem, and teach CMake how to invoke that tool as part of the build process. Code generation, cryptographic signature utilities, and even ray-tracers have been written in CMake Language, but this is not a recommended practice.
Having written a raytracer earlier, and re-written it for the GPU, this statement caught my eye and made me wonder what would be an even better language to write a raytracer in.
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