[grt-talk]GRT News Flash

[Nikodemus Siivola]

Grtlite is dead! Long live the GRT!

So: the C-library under LGPL called grtlite is no longer
under development. If a volunteer appears, things may change.

Development is now focused on GRT: a Common Lisp based raytracing system.
Currently supported implementations are CMUCL, SBCL and CLISP (with most
of the development and testing done on CMUCL).

Estimated release date for GRT 0.1 is in late January, early February.

This may seem like a huge change of direction, and in a way it is, but I
think that it better reflects the original goals of the project:

 * Produce a set of free raytracing tools, with a single backend
   and multiple frontends.

The original plan was to have a C library as the backend, but as I was
wrapping it for Ruby I realized that for the kind of flexibility I wanted
that was the wrong approach: for true power I would alway have had to go
back to C.

This is the same basic issue that I have with POV-ray in another guise:
brilliant renderer, scripting language that sucks, no reasonable way to get
to the internals. (In case of grtlite that was a shoddy renderer, brilliant
skripting language, no reasonable way to get to the internals.)

With Common Lisp we can build a brilliant renderer, with brilliant
scripting language, with internals ready at hand.

As for frontends, I am envisioning a server listening to a socket: so you
could share the same backend process between multiple clients:

 * spline editor
 * OpenGL preview
 * color picker
 * metaball modeller
 * ...etc

All working on the same scene at the same time: and any time you want you
can talk Lisp to the server to bend it in arbitary ways. ;)

Life is good,

  -- Nikodemus