that "place" you refer to - are you speaking about your early days in Russia, or the US? Because I assure you discrimination is alive and well in both places.
I don't have anything to compare to, but Go seems quite fast. I would guess no worse than 2x C in this case, but I'm pulling that number out of my butt.
Actually I was originally going to write this in C but it started to be a PITA and I had the spontaneous idea that maybe Go would be the right choice for this (never used it before). It totally was. No way I would've had this level of results so quickly in C.
Being a big fan of Python and C, Go seems like a really good middle ground. Really happy to have learned it.
As someone trying to learn the basics of rendering, I was really pleased to see your project pop up on the github explore email today. It's very easy to follow, even for a non-Go programmer like me.
Performance question from a no-Go programmer though - does returning objects from functions incur a cost? For example "func Reflect() Ray {}" or "func Add() Vector" - do they create a new object on the heap? If so is that an issue in Go?
I'm very very impressed by your code quality especially when this is just your first Go project. I'm an experienced Go developer btw. You're just so good.
I'm interested in more information about why you decided to alter GOMAXPROCS and what your results were from testing.
I've had a play with this myself and found that it cause sporadic and unpredictable crashing (very different style of application though - I was building a webserver). However this was an earlier iteration of Go (possibly Go 1.1 but likely 1.2) so things may have improved since then, or you might have found a saner way of tweaking it.
When GOMAXPROCS > 1, your program goes from "everything is executed sequentially" to "everything is maybe executed in parallel." This can expose data race bugs in your code that aren't present when GOMAXPROCS = 1.
You know, that's entirely possible. I was playing around with different methods of passing data between goroutines for increasing performance and I knew one of the methods I was testing wasn't idiomatic Go. However since I wasn't getting race conditions normally i assumed that the GOMAXPROCS fault wasn't down to my shonky code.
The weird thing is I thought I'd read somewhere that said Go defaulted to a process per CPU core (like the OP has hardcoded ib this project). I'm guessing that isn't the case then? It sadly wouldn't be the first time I've misread something! :(
For small stuff, their entry level 5$ a month droplet is perfect and pretty much beats anything else I've come across. Having SSD backed storage is nice too.
Watching these answers stream in on the spreadsheet really makes me think of what a realtime reddit or stack exchange could look like. Adding live interaction from observers (likes, comment streams, etc).
No rep needed if all they want is coverage. If they want to craft the message, they still need PR. The job just changes from selling the story to getting the right people to cover it in the right way.
That's why Apple still takes PR very seriously even though the media are going to cover all of their product launches anyway.
