Writing a Pathtracer in Lua, Week 1

I love this.

In the context of embedded/low level programming, I've never had more fun nor higher productivity than writing logic in Lua and leaving the heavy stuff to C. LuaJIT has the nicest FFI[0] I've ever seen which alone means that you're more likely to call out to C as the maintenance cost of doing so is very low.

0. https://luajit.org/ext_ffi.html

My favorite part of Lua development is when you get the test runner to work and it runs 200+ unit tests in 100ms.

Nice, simple article. I'd have been nicer if you could justify the design of using scripting in this ray tracer. It only does create, save and delete image which is also a wrapper around equivalent C++ functions.

It feels like using Lua just for the fun of it; if this was the intention then pay no heed to this comment.

Well, this is the first part of a series so it may be worth waiting for a few more before making a judgement.

I wouldn't be surprised if the author was interested in quickly playing with variant light transport algorithms, BRDFs, etc. There, hotloading might be useful.

In the flowchart there's quite a lot of work being done in Lua.

It's just in the flowchart, not in code.

Not a lot to see here.