Writing a Raytracer, and some other random thoughts

I always wanted to write a raytracer, and theoretically I knew enough math and programming to do it for a long time. Yet, I didn't write one before - this is because I thought it would be a gigantic project. Well, I'm gald to tell you that at least a basic ray tracer is not too big!

The picture above is from a half-done ray tracer which I'm implementing during a course in computer graphics (which I'm taking now). I have documented the math that I needed, along with annoying bugs that I had (and I'm sure that at least some of these are common bugs).

When I finish this project in the following weeks, I intend to publish these documents. Currently I have:

• A list of things which can cause annoying bugs, which are related to how ray tracers should work.
• A document explaining many common 3D calculations (instead of taking these for granted, like we did in class).

I may publish more documentation about writing a ray tracer when I'm done - but this is just quick update about what I'm currently working on.

During writing the raytracer, I saw the influence of choosing the right programming language. We started with C++ and after we had memory leak that we failed to trace (even with valgrind and friends) we migrated to java (in which you have to work very hard to leak memory) - since it was the begining and converting the code was quicker than fixing the leak.

The debate about programming languages made me wonder - when GIMP 2.8 is finally out (and I'll start working on gimp again in the next weeks - I had too many things to do lately), and the writing of GIMP 3.0 starts, should we keep using C?

C is OK, as long as you know what you are doing, unlike C++ in which you can still make things crash even if you *think* you know what you are doing. I would really like to see GIMP in a higher level programming language, but it seems as if Java and C# are out of the question (patents, political/idiological reasons, ...). About a month ago, someone introduced me to Vala - a new OOP programming language, which works very nicely with the GNOME libraries, and it's translated to C code so that it works on most platforms.

I wonder if it's possible to convert the code gradually to Vala - and have the C code integrate with the converted Vala code. It is theoretically possible (I think, since Vala translates into C), I just wonder if it's practical, and what would other developers think about this idea.

Also, is Vala mature enough? And more importantly, Is Vala known enough? I did find several projects that use it, but when I tried to check how many people know it (asked fellow students in the university labs - sounds like the right place to ask) most people said they never heard about it.

Edit: See the comments below for a discussion for/against languages such as javascript/python/perl