go-mandelbrot

A mandelbrot set fractal generator, demonstrating parallelism using go's concurrency features

Demo

Build

under root run go build

App

• Drag with left mouse button to pan
• Press Esc to exit

Planned Feature

• Basic panning and zooming
• Skip chunks when not dirty
• Parallelism with work queue item compressing
• Pre-generate chunks
• Support arbitrary precision (infinite zoom)
• Decouple from SDL2 for rendering

Implementation

Overview

• scene does drawing, and transforms pixel-space actions of the user to number-space.
• canvas abstracts over hardware texture, and transform number-space actions from scene to texel-space. handles when to do iteration and draw work. owns workqueues that manages chunks to be processed.
• chunk regions in texel space. smallest unit on which work is done.

Parallelizing Work

Computing iterations can be trivially parallelized since it only depends on local data i.e. the represented complex numbers within the chunk. Also, since it's quite long-running, it greatly benefits from parallelism.

On the other hand, the speed of drawing to texture is bound by uploading data to the GPU, so running on a single thread is sufficient.