mandulia-0.5 released

Video download options:

A new release of mandulia (a zooming visualization of the Mandelbrot Set as many Julia Sets, with Lua scripting support) is installable from Hackage:

cabal install mandulia

or, if your CPU doesn't support SSE4 instructions:

cabal install mandulia -f-SSE4

After you have installed it, you can try it out by running:

mandulia main

and hit the 'a' key to enter attract mode or use the key controls listed in the README for interactive navigation.

mandulia-0.5 runs in asymptotic constant space, aesthetics tweaks give more colourful 'neon' output and the randomized attract mode picks more interesting places to explore.

O(1) space usage was achieved by recomputing the current path down from the top of the substitution tiling tree each time, instead of navigating around a shared tree that could grow indefinitely; and by using greater strictness in some mutable references (such as the statistics logger and the scripting interface).

There is one small bug in this release that I noticed too late (and isn't quite big enough to warrant an entirely new upload): the program help text states that configurations 'interactive' and 'random' are included, but they have been combined into one configuration called 'main'. A feature of this new 'main' configuration allows you to specify additional personal configuration in the user settings directory, for example (on Linux) ~/.mandulia/config.lua.

Source code is GPLv3+ licensed, Git repository at maximus/mandulia on Gitorious mandulia on code.mathr.co.uk, or you can download mandulia-0.5.tar.gz.