GoTracer - a Raytracer written in Go

A very simple Raytracer written in the Go programming language. The main purposes of this project are:

1. Get hands-on experience with Go
2. Experiment with the feasibility of low-level optimizations you would normally do in C or C++, like improving data structures for cache efficiency

Currently, it supports:

• Spheres and planes
• Point lights
• Shadows
• Phong shading
• Reflections

How to build and run

The project follows Go's code organization conventions, so you'll first need to setup a Go workspace if you don't have one yet. Luckily, Go can do most of the work for you.

First, install go, then do the following:

mkdir <directory_of_your_choice>
export GOPATH=<full/path/to/directory_of_your_choice>
go get github.com/lethal-guitar/go_tracer

This will setup a Go workspace in <directory_of_your_choice>, clone this repository, and build it. Afterwards, you will find a executable named go_tracer inside the bin subdirectory of your freshly created Go workspace. If you run it, you get an image named out.png.

Note: In order to take advantage of parallelization, you need to set the environment variable GOMAXPROCS to the desired number of OS threads - the number of CPU cores in your machine is usually a good choice.

Running the unit tests requires the Check testing framework. You can easily install it by doing go get gopkg.in/check.v1.

Manual setup

If you'd prefer to manually setup your Go workspace and clone the project's source code, you first need to setup the following directory structure:

<top level dir>
  |
  |-<bin>
  |-<pkg>
  |-<src>
    |
    |-<github.com>
      |
      |-<lethal-guitar>
        |
        |-<go_tracer>

In addition, you need to set the environment variable GOPATH to point at your top level dir as with the automated setup. Now, you have a working Go workspace, and you can clone this repository into the go_tracer path you created inside it.

Afterwards, there are two ways to build the project. You can either build from the root of your Go workspace like so:

go build github.com/lethal-guitar/go_tracer

This will put the compiled executable in the bin directory, just like with the automated setup.

Alternatively, you can:

cd github.com/lethal-guitar/go_tracer
go build

The executable will then end up inside the go_tracer directory.