Building a Fractal Explorer to Test‑Drive My Homegrown Language

I’ve been building a small programming language and needed a project that was visual, demanding, and unforgiving about performance. Fractals turned out to be the perfect testbed: they’re embarrassingly parallel, heavy on floating‑point work, and any bug shows up immediately as a glitch on the screen. In this post I’ll walk through how I wired a Fractal explorer in the browser using: A homegrown language as the “authoring layer” WebAssembly as the execution target A minimal JavaScript shell for input and rendering Why Fractals Make Great Language Benchmarks From a distance, a fractal is just an image. From the runtime’s point of view, it’s a brutal little benchmark: Millions of pixels, same loop shape, different data Lots of floating‑point operations Clear performance feedback: do users see results in milliseconds or seconds? That combination makes fractals a nice stress test for: Code generation quality (are we emitting tight loops?) Numeric semantics (are we handling edge cases and pr