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{zero point nine} personal experiments, etc.

Hello Rust (ASCII fractal visualizer)

Again, as a way of learning a new language, I've written a Mandelbrot set visualizer. I'm really liking the language Rust so far. I hope it succeeds.

To keep the focus on learning language features and avoid getting sidetracked by the various ins-and-outs of some random graphics API, I went for an ASCII style approach for the visuals, outputting to the terminal.

A few things of note:

  • Given the limited 'dynamic range' of ASCII-style output, I added a kind of 'auto-exposure' logic as an experiment, which enhances the appearance of the text output considerably.
  • The fractal data is generated on multiple threads, which makes it possible to navigate deeper into the Mandelbrot set in realtime.
  • As with the Scala version mentioned previously, I developed the beginnings of an animator/tweener class in order to animate everything possible (though I'd like to make this more ergonomic in the future).
  • Rotation is supported (using the '[' and ']' keys)
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