Show HN: Mandelbrot set renderer written in pure [BSD] Makefiles

A developer going by b-aaz posted to Hacker News on July 7, 2026 a project called bmake-extravaganza: a Mandelbrot set renderer written entirely in BSD Makefiles, invoking no shell commands and executing no external binaries.

The project, hosted on GitHub per the Show HN submission, uses bmake — the make(1) implementation found in BSD operating systems, also installable on Linux via most package managers under the name "bmake". The author notes in the post that users on Linux can clone the repository and run `bmake` in place of `make` to render the fractal.

The technical constraint is the point of the exercise. As b-aaz explains in the HN post, BSD make "does not support basic arithmetic, it doesn't have infinite loops, no floating point support" — yet the project renders a Mandelbrot set regardless. The project description explicitly states there are "no calls to shell, no external binaries executed, just pure [BSD] Makefiles."

The Mandelbrot set is a well-known benchmark for creative constraint programming: its rendering requires complex-number iteration, floating-point arithmetic, and looping — none of which bmake natively provides. Building a renderer inside a tool designed purely for dependency resolution and build orchestration is a deliberate exercise in pushing a utility well past its intended limits, in the tradition of projects that implement games or math inside SQL, CSS, or other declarative systems.

The submission had 1 point and no comments at the time of indexing, per the HN data. No company, funding, or commercial context is attached to the project; it appears to be a solo hobbyist effort. The repository is publicly available on GitHub under the handle b-aaz.