The Nim Ray Tracer Project --- Part 1: Introduction

[Listening to the albums Reverberant Skies and White Maps from Aglaia in an infinite loop… A beautifully hypnotic experience! The track In the First Spinning Place from White Maps is my absolute favourite.]
Why a ray tracer? I’ve been fascinated by ray tracing since my childhood. I still remember the first time I was playing around with an early 3D modeller/ray tracer program on the Amiga 500 called Imagine when I was about 13, trying to render some extruded letters made of glass placed on a classic checker-board patterned surface (don’t laugh, this was sort of a novel thing to do at that time, and I was a kid).