The Mandelbrot set is THE most popular example of fractal. There are thousands of implementations to plot the Mandelbrot set in different languages using different techniques. I re-implemented Mandelbrot set mainly for fun and for learning OpenGL, GLSL and HTML5 canvas. Here are the four implementations:
- glfractal.c in C and plain OpenGL. This program demonstrates how to use the basic OpenGL. It has an interesting feature of dumping the coordinates in a short HEX string such that we can come back to the position later – when you find a beautiful area in the Mandelbrot set, you can hardly find it again without this feature.
- glslfractal.c in C and GLSL using single-precision floating point numbers. This program is modified from the source code on this page. It runs much faster than the CPU-only version. However, you cannot zoom in too much due to the loss of precision.
- glslfractale.c in C and GLSL using emulated double-precision numbers. This program aims to alleviate the precision problem, but the result is not so satisfactory.
- HTML5+javascript (a live web page!). It also supports HEX dump/restore. You can click the following links to see a few areas I like. You may need to wait for a few seconds as your browser computes the image on the fly: image 1, image 2, image 3 and image 4. Enjoy.
There is also an unfinished webGL implementation. It is supposed to be as fast as the C+GLSL version.
Attractive Chaos 
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