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manas96
Wohoo, my name is in the contributors list! This helped me get in a computer graphics grad course at a top(?) school and certainly helped in further job applications.

If anyone else is interested in a graduate degree in this field, I recommend doing something similar - I simply made a few reasonable PRs to fix some issues that I found when following along the books.

soegaard
It's a fun tutorial to try out new languages.

Here is the result of following the tutorial using Rhombus.

https://github.com/soegaard/miniray

pjmlp
Yes, I used as experiment for C++20 modules, C# SIMD instructions and Rust.
Y_Y
I strongly approve of this. Code snippets are nice, but with new languages⁰ it's rare to have an example of a self-contained but and complete application to get a holistic view. I think a raytracer (or its equivalent) should be a standard example.

0: Or is Rhombus a dialect? Or alternative writing system for an existing language? Or just an elaborate system of shrubs?

kookamamie
> Program files will include rtweekend.h first, so all other header files (where the bulk of our code will reside) can implicitly assume that rtweekend.h has already been included.

Not a great practice. Header files shouldn't assume anything from previous inclusions of other headers.

Sure, this works as a weekend hack, but it would be nice if book (article) would promote good conventions.

veltas
This is a normal practice for applications, and allows you to pre-compile that header for performance. I don't think it's a bad enough practice to warrant complaining, but it's good for people to know the advantages or disadvantages.
on_the_train
Headers should still be self contained, although precompiled headers are used. Those things are mostly orthogonal
danielpettersso
I can also recommend this book when looking for something fun to implement while learning a new language. There is also the follow ups to this taking things a bit further:

https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingTheNextWeek.htm... https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingTheRestOfYourLi...

I did this ray tracing library in Rust inspired by these books: https://github.com/DanielPettersson/solstrale-rust

And also a small UI using the lib: https://github.com/DanielPettersson/solstrale-desktop-rust

Kind of not maintained anymore.. But fun way learning Rust..

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pdpi
One thing that's not directly related to ray-tracing proper, so makes no sense in this book series, but is still a pretty natural (and fun!) next step (or detour) is embedding e.g. a Lua interpreter so you can use that as a scene description language separate from the rendering engine proper.