I had a realization today that I think I may be able to get my old Haskell ray tracer up and working. As it turns out, I may have been completely wrong when expecting the program to be able to generate high-resolution images. The implementation obviously has its flaws, however I think I was simply expecting too much of it. This clicked when I realized that the book suggests using much lower resolutions than I expected when rendering. Even for a completely blank canvas, the design of the program will lead to high memory usage. This usage quickly exceeds what is feasible, aside from other implementation details.

I am going to max out my python implementation at 640x480 images and try to finish the book. If I find myself inspired, I'll loop back to my Haskell implementation (still hidden in my git history) and try the same there.

I don't know why this never hit me before, but I'll chalk it up to the Covid outbreak starting while I worked on this. That sounds like a good enough excuse to me :)

The affect that perspective and time spent away from a problem can have on one's perception of the problem will always surprise me. This seems dead simple to me now.