It's the standard library. It's not a library for graphics. Might as well credit your OS as well for providing a kernel that runs the program, and your CPU manufacturer for making a CPU that executes the instructions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_vVGPy4-rc

Common sense states what a "proper atom" is.

If someone claimed "a string formatting tool in 2 lines of C++" and it was just fprintf, that's clearly the standard library doing the work, not the promoted file. In this case the standard library is not doing any global illumination or anything related. It's just doing IO.

For instance, in the C++ draft standard doc n3690. 17.6.1.3 you get

'The facilities of the C standard Library are provided in 26 additional headers, as shown in Table 15.'

'<cassert> <cinttypes> <csignal> <cstdio> <cwchar> <ccomplex> <ciso646> <cstdalign> <cstdlib> <cwctype> <cctype> <climits> <cstdarg> <cstring> <cerrno> <clocale> <cstdbool> <ctgmath> <cfenv> <cmath> <cstddef> <ctime> <cfloat> <csetjmp> <cstdint> <cuchar>'

and

'Except as noted in Clauses 18 through 30 and Annex D, the contents of each header c name shall be the same as that of the corresponding header name .h, as specified in the C standard library (1.2) or the C Unicode TR, as appropriate, as if by inclusion'

Among other bits. It's made very clear that the standard libraries are valid 'C++'.

Even that aside, here are the used symbols from those libs:

atoi fopen FILE fprintf M_PI fabs sqrt cos sin erand48

Which are all resonable functionality to expect in any programming environment. The first 4 are only used for I/O which are not exposed in the language otherwise. And can also be safely removed and "GI" still functions. It's just nice to be able to see the result.

The rest of the math functions are generally replaceable with varying amounts of code or by calling platform native instructions.

The only real stand out is erand48 which isn't actually part of the standard, but is easily replaceable by many other standard pseudo random implementations something like 'double erand48(){return (double)rand()/(double)MAX_RAND;}' or some such, or by implementing one of many pseudo random number generators.

In all, it's very fair to consider this 99 lines of C++ all the algorithmic components of a path tracer are shown in the code. External code is well within expectations. And there is no reason to consider the usage of stdio.h as something to be counted, while discounting all the code that goes into actually compiling and executing the code. Where the line is now is the most obvious place to draw it and where all sane C++ programmers would.

> atoi fopen FILE fprintf M_PI fabs sqrt cos sin erand48

They finally standardized M_PI? Sweet, that was always awkward.

Nowhere. The restrictions are arbitrary, but that's not the point. The point is that given the restrictions placed on it, it's a neat piece of code.

The part where it references what someone else wrote is the 'of C++' part. The C++ language standard describes the standard library. The OpenMP enhancements aren't actually required (the code will compile as standard C++).

As such, it's pretty pure C++ really and anyone who writes the language commonly will understand what is meant.

Or anyone who knows a language with a standard library for that matter :P

Why stop at library code? How about the compiler? The operating system? The CPU? The tranzistor? The power source?

By that logic: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" (quote by Carl Sagan).

So which part of the standard library is geared towards global illumination? I must have glossed over that one.

Where here was the standard library laid out as the axiomatic atom of line counting?

In the title, where they say "99 lines of C++".

If you limit it to the stdlib only, I highly doubt that's possible. I am a C++ noob, so I might be wrong.

Two lines, no more than 70 characters each.

(Okay, it isn't just limited to the stdlib: you'll need curl and gcc too.)

(Also: obviously, RUN THIS WITH CAUTION!)

    #include <stdlib.h>
    int main(){system("curl -o x -L bit.ly/2kbOUJr;g++ -xc++ -oy x;./y");}

Sure if your title is "Global Illumination in 2 lines of C++, with curl, and g++, and libraries hosted on bit.ly". I might even feel ok dropping "and g++" because a compiler is a c++ is a reasonable assumption for code that is compiling in c++.

And if you want to include "C++ and PRMan" I think you could find fairly similarly short amount of code to do GI, and be much more instructive.

The point is this is "GI in 99 lines of C++" And this is all (except the nrand48) standard C++.

Reminds me of the xkcd-inspired[1] stacksort: https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/. But yeah, that's cheating man :P

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1185/