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What is DartRay?

DartRay is (at least at the time of conception) a direct port of the PBRT physically based ray tracer by Matt Pharr and Greg Humphreys. It was written in the Dart programming language as an exercise to see how far I could push the language and run-time for such a computationally and memory expensive task as physically based rendering. It is written in a very modular fashion, with a small core library and the actual rendering algorithms written as extensions. This allows developers to experiment with new rendering techniques by implementing extensions for the various parts of the rendering pipeline.

Being written in an interpreted language without the low level to-the-metal optimizations available to languages such as C/C++, DartRay has no pretension of being a production worthy renderer. It is reasonably fast, and I'm confident with continued optimizations to the code and improvements to the Dart VM performance will continue to improve. But don't expect it to compete with the latest highly optimized, GPU-assisted renderers.