>   http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/ray_tracer/languages.html

Thanks. A lot of very interesting stuff there. I'm surprised that
SMLNJ is as fast as OCamlopt on x86. I thought it had a reputation for
being slow because it's "continuations-based" (or whatever). Java is
the only one bytecode-compiled, so it's also interesting that it's
competitive in speed.

It might be interesting to see how C/C++ does when linked with Boehm's
GC. My own experiments with it impressed me very much.