A Raycaster in Bash

Very cool! I'm curious when it says "did you know that accessing a random element in an array takes linear time", why that's the case, with bash?

normal arrays in bash are implemented as linked lists. bash stores a pointer to the last accessed element, which turns the most common case of iteration into O(1), but the performance is terrible if you need to jump around

see some basic benchmarks here https://gist.github.com/izabera/16a46ed79c2248349a1fb8384468...

there are also associative arrays which are bucketed hash tables, which are fine for string keys but imho they are hardly ever worth it as a replacement for indexed arrays