I think a little toy raytracer is another great thing to try out. Just something that outputs bitmap graphics of spheres and does diffuse and specular reflection, couple light sources. Should be a relatively self-limited project if you don't go too crazy with it.
I went to a university with a great computer science & video games major, and while I didn’t finish out all the credits, I took a couple of the videogame classes; holy shit, you will never learn more about how to abuse geometry and data structures than trying to render graphics.
Hey, putting a ray tracer and a web browser in the same category of "more challenging projects" seems a bit weird. A ray tracer is a weekend project. A web browser is a multiple man-years project, unless you use a third-party HTML+CSS engine and a third-party JS engine.
depends on the ray tracer. You can make "a" ray tracer in a weekend. You can spend months making a mid-scoped tracer if you decide to pick up PBRT (which is online for completely free now!): https://pbr-book.org/4ed/contents
If you want to upgrade your "weekend" ray tracer to a 2-4 week project, I'd suggest:
1. have it take input a scene/model file (FBX is the industry standard but also a pain in the butt because Autodesk. I'd suggest looking at gltf or blender scenes). This may or may not mean supporting triangles/quads if you only focused on spheres and planes.
2. texture support. Which sounds easy and then you enter the wonderful world of sampling. you can dive as shallow or as deep as you want there.
Try using USD instead[0]. It's an open scene description from Pixar that is well documentented and seeing adoption across the board - including apps like Blender.
My point is that a barebones ray tracer (spheres, planes, metal vs plastic) is much, much simpler than a barebones web browser (a minimal HTML parser + a minimal CSS parser and cascading + a minimal JS implementation + a miimal layout engine + a minimal renderer).
A text-only browser without scripting support, like lynx, could be a more reasonable project, but still larger than a basic ray tracer, or even a ray tracer + a basic material system.
