It saddens me, a bit, that Fractint hasn't "kept up with the times." The technological landscape certainly has changed since I sent in my contributions 20+ years ago. (I optimized Lyapunov and L-systems. My L-systems optimization took advantage of the way integer code never touched the FP stack, so I could load the engine state into the FP registers and leave it there as the L-system parser happily indirected pointers-to-function.) Companies are often willing to subsidize open source development if the project is aligned with their business interests, but I guess the economics of open source don't translate to rendering pretty pictures!

I have very little time these days, what with the family, working a demanding job at Amazon, and continuing a part-time life as an author (The CUDA Handbook, June 2013). But every once in a while, I get to wondering, What's up with Fractint?, find a copy of the source code, unpack it, and start looking around, and say Man, This code needs a LOT of work. I wouldn't even know where to start!

The name of the project is dated, of course - there are still reasons to use fixed point here and there, but performance isn't one of them. An optimized CPU implementation of a fractal generator would use SSE (or now AVX), have separate single and double precision implementations, and leverage multicore hardware. Fractals are extremely computationally dense, so are a good fit both for GPU computing and for clustering. It's getting a bit far afield from my own expertise, but open source compiler technology (LLVM etc.) has advanced to the point where the custom fractal engines likely could take advantage.

A modern project would put clear divisions of labor between the fractal processing, translating the iteration counts to images, and the user interface. It might be more efficient to start from scratch and migrate code (or ideas) from Fractint a bit at a time. But with the limited time I could invest in such a project, I feel a bit like one of the mice from The Bell and the Cat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_cat

If it isn't already in bitbucket or github or some other open source repository, I'd encourage migration of the "latest" (such as it is) code base to one of those.