On: POV-Ray – The Persistence of Vision Raytracer (202...

[dagw]

Depends what you mean? If you want a modern high performance ray tracer with support for all the latest hardware and implementing all the cutting edge ray tracing research, there is Embree and OptiX. They don't however come with their own scene description language, which is what made POV-Ray so popular in the first place.

[sztanko → dagw]

I was thinking for some python (or similar language) api for Ray tracer that doesn't have a steep learning curve and is easy to use.

[kristianp → sztanko]

https://mitsuba.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html

There seems to exist python front ends to embree. How good this one is, I don't know.

[zokier → dagw]

OpenUSD is probably the closest thing in terms of scene description? You have both Python Api and human-readable ascii format