Should Raysect v1 just support polarised light? about source HOT 4 CLOSED

If the performance impact is moderate, I would follow your advice from the Readme:

The general development philosophy is ease of use trumps performance, but performance is not to be ignored.

It sounds like a single code path would result in a considerable improvement in ease-of-use (both for end users and maintainers), larger than the reduction in performance.

Since Cherab already makes heavy use of caching and interpolating, perhaps some of the performance could be clawed back through improvements there, such as cherab/core#50.

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I looked through the new code in v1/feature/polarisation. Even at this stage, it is already clear that maintaining both polarised and unpolarised versions of all related classes and methods would be very painful. I support the idea of abandoning the unpolarised light calculations, even at the cost of performance.

from source.

Thanks for the feedback. I have been heavily leaning to abandoning the unpolarised code. I've run a quick Cornell box test, it is looking to be a ~20% hit, but I think I can claw a lot of that back moving the internals from numpy to python.array.

from source.

Decision has been made that v1 will implement only polarised light propagation.

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