August 5, 2026
Make drama, not just makefiles
BSD Make extravaganza: Mandelbrot Set In bmake
Someone made computer art with a build tool, and the comments instantly split into awe and eye-rolls
TLDR: A developer made a painfully slow math-art generator using a tool that was never meant for this, pushing it so hard some images took more than a day. Commenters were split between admiration for the absurd creativity, typo-policing, and a savage claim that this kind of tinkering is why BSD fell behind Linux.
A coder has done the kind of thing that makes the internet clap, groan, and open a new tab all at once: they built a Mandelbrot image renderer—basically a program that draws famous swirly mathematical art—using BSD Make, a tool normally meant for organizing software builds, not painting pixels for 36 hours straight. The project proudly avoids calling outside programs, warns that a bigger image can eat your computer for days or even a week, and even embraces weird accidental stripe patterns like they’re part of the aesthetic. Naturally, the crowd did what the crowd does best: turn the whole thing into a mini culture war with jokes on top.
One commenter arrived with pure internet energy: not to debate the feat, but to fix a typo—changing “suppers” to “suppress”—before giving it a polite thumbs-up for “creative (ab)use.” That set the tone perfectly: half impressed, half unable to resist nitpicking. Then came the spiciest drive-by, with one user declaring this is basically why the BSD world “lost ground to Linux,” accusing people of wasting time “playing” instead of doing serious work. Ouch. But defenders of glorious nerd nonsense were ready too, praising the stunt as exactly the kind of delightfully unnecessary project the web lives for. In other words: one side saw a ridiculous masterpiece, the other saw proof of terminal hobbyism, and everyone else got a fantastic new example of computers being used in the dumbest possible best way.
Key Points
- •The article describes a Mandelbrot set renderer implemented entirely in BSD make without invoking external binaries.
- •The project was motivated by the author's conclusion that BSD make is computationally universal after studying FreeBSD ports makefiles and the make manual.
- •The renderer outputs PPM images and can be run with commands such as `make > output.ppm`, with configurable variables for width, height, and zoom.
- •The author warns that the renderer is extremely inefficient, with some renders taking from many hours to potentially a week of sustained CPU time.
- •Core arithmetic is implemented manually using digit-based addition, subtraction, multiplication, and reciprocal-based division via the Newton-Raphson method.