[SoSoRoCoCo]

I wrote a raytracer in 1996, and then a year later used Intel's VTune to speed it up. Just removing unused "return" statements gave me 3x speed increase. Apparently Borland C/C++ wasn't very smart back then.

A fun project I did after that was writing a AI frame language to do goal-stack problem solving, specifically with path finding. I connected it to the ray tracer and made movies of spheres having wars. (I used an unlicensed DivX encoder to stitch together thousands of GIFs.)

[thealig]

That sounds fun. Do you have code for reference? Also I want to try out building a raytracer sometime as a hobby project, is it advisable to learn some 3d graphic concepts like WebGl and so?

[carl_dr]

Check Ray Tracing In One Weekend out : https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingInOneWeekend.ht...

You can very quickly get something on the screen with it, although getting an intuition for how it works may take a little longer and some reading around the concepts it introduces. But it does let you focus on the maths rather than worrying about also learning how Web/OpenGL works too.