The roads I take...

As comments to yesterday's post about TraceMonkey suggested I should show my code so the JIT code could be improved for things like what I'm doing, I decided to go all the way and publish this today.
I just completed putting all my code of this project under the Mozilla tri-license and making it available via both a gitweb interface and for cloning with git clone http://git-public.kairo.at/mandelbrot.git.

That said, a few details about the application itself:

This is a fun side project, its main target is for me to learn XULRunner and improve my skills with the used technologies. Its second target is to recreate an application I had started for my my final paper in school with modern technologies.
The application renders images of the Mandelbrot set fractal, the original application had nice zoom functionality and could even render the very similarly calculated family of Julia set fractals, which are both features I want to add incrementally to this XULRunner-based version as well.

The current versions calls itself "KaiRo.at Mandelbrot 4pre", which probably warrants a short view on the version history: The first version, "RK-Mandelbrot 1.0" was created in Visual Basic 3 during work on that school paper, I incremented the minor version number as I went along with that work, the version I had on a disk coming with the paper was "RK-Mandelbrot 2.0", this or a slight minor update to it was also used during the presentation/exam on that paper. I later updated it to Visual Basic 5 and played with a few features, calling the result "KaiRo-Mandelbrot 3.0", also noting the change from using my initials to the "KaiRo" name for my work. Because of this history, I'm targeting a version number of 4.0 for the XULRunner rewrite, and also using "KaiRo.at" as the vendor name, as that's also what I'm using as my corporation name prefix.

Some comments on the current code:

On the base level, I created a mandelbrot launch script, which tires to find a XULRunner in a few places and uses it to launch the app using the application.ini inside the xulapp directory, which contains files in the usual structure for XULRunner apps.

In the running app (the launch script also launches the error console for debugging), the File menu enables access to drawing the image, saving it (very ugly right now, hardcoding /home/robert/temp/canvas-save.png as the path!) and quitting the app. The Settings enables different settings for maximum number of iterations (I'm using a simple escape time algorithm) and color palettes (which are currently stretched according to the max iterations number; also, I have not ported all palettes I had in the VB version, leaving the non-ported ones in an ugly comment in the JS file). Today, I also added a Debug menu that allows switching TraceMonkey on and off and switching between the slow but nice-looking object-oriented algorithm and the faster but not so pretty numeric algorithm. I also added a label at the bottom of the window that informs about the currently performed action and a rough time measurement when drawing is complete.

The image you'll get with the default settings of max. 500 iterations and my custom "KaiRo.at" color palette looks like this:

Once I can do a zoom function, I hope I can produce more interesting images - I'll publish a number of them in the gallery.

There's a lot that probably can be improved in that app, it's just a fun personal playground, as I said. But if anyone wants to look into what it does and perhaps see how TraceMonkey could perform better on it, feel free to look into it, the source is all open!