I TA'd a rendering course once and wound up assigning a homework where the students implemented their own software rasterizers in CUDA. Before that homework, a lot of students didn't really understand what a rasterizer did. Afterwards, everyone got it.

I'm not a C++11 developer, I've done a little C++ in the past. What is the pride in putting all the code in the header file? Shouldn't the declarations be there, and the definitions be pulled out into a .cpp file? Is it somehow smaller, faster, more convenient to have it all in a header file?

Why aren't you using nullptr instead of casting NULL to your pointer type?

What exactly is the difference between this and for example a simple ray tracer? Seems like it takes a lot of the same steps.

I recently unearthed the code I wrote at school in 1996 which implemented a 3D Gouraud-shaded renderer that managed ~1000 triangles/sec on a 33MHz 486. It's a great learning experience doing this from scratch.

Mine did Bresenham's algorithm for pixel fill rather than the winding approach used here.

Very cool - any perf stats though? Would be interesting to see how this compares to other software renderers.