[hakonjdjohnsen]

Yes, exactly. I have not looked at Mitsuba 2, but Mitsuba 3 is absolutely along these lines. It is just starting to be picked up by some of the nonimaging/illumination community, e.g. there was a paper last year from Aurele Adam's group at TU Delft where they used it for optimizing a "magic window" [1]. Some tradeoffs and constraints are a bit different when doing optical design versus doing (inverse) rendering, but it definitely shows what is possible.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.515422

[roflmaostc]

Shameless plug, we use Mitsuba 3/Dr.JIT for image optimization around volumetric 3D printing https://github.com/rgl-epfl/drtvam

[pjmlp]

It looks quite interesting, especially the part of scripting everything in Python with a JIT, instead of the traditional having to do everything in either C or C++.

Looking forward to some weekend paper reading.

[hakonjdjohnsen]

Looks really cool! I look forward to reading your paper. Do you know if a recording of the talk is/will be posted somewhere?

[accurrent]

I dont know much about Optical engineering, but this sounds super exciting. I think I meant to point to mitsuba 3, not 2.