canvas_ity

Agreed, that sort of documentation is pure gold when done well. It's something I always try to pay forward by doing in my own code. For example, one of my own lone-developer projects was an STB-style single-header <canvas>-like rasterizer library for C++. I started the implementation half of the library with a short overview of the rendering pipeline's dataflow and the top-level functions responsible for each stage: https://github.com/a-e-k/canvas_ity/blob/f32fbb37e2fe7c0fcae...

https://github.com/a-e-k/canvas_ity A tiny, single-header <canvas>-like 2D rasterizer for C++ More detail -- This is an STB-style single-header C++ library with no dependencies beyond the standard C++ library. In about 2300 lines of 78-column code (not counting blanks or comments), or 1300 semicolons, it implements an API based on the basic W3C <canvas> specification to draw 2D vector graphics into an image buffer: - Strokes and fills (with antialiasing and gamma-correct blending) - Linear and radial gradients - Patterns (with repeat modes and bi-cubic resampling) - Line caps and line joins (handling high curvature) - Dash patterns and dash offsets - Transforms - Lines, quadratic and cubic Beziers, arcs, and rectangles - Text (very basic, but does its own TTF font file parsing!) - Raster images (i.e., s

I've done this. For a project where I didn't want any external dependencies, I wrote an uncompressed PNG writer for RGBA8 images in a single function. It's just over 90 lines of C++: https://github.com/a-e-k/canvas_ity/blob/f32fbb37e2fe7c0fcae...