pixie

On rasterization & basic typesetting (no ligatures/gsub lookups): check out pixie https://github.com/treeform/pixie

We have written pixie: https://github.com/treeform/pixie . Pixie is a 2D graphics library similar to Cairo and Skia written entirely in Nim. Which I think is a big accomplishment. It even has python bindings: https://pypi.org/project/pixie-python/

Perhaps not the "best" source code I've ever read, but libVF.io had some beautiful code for what's generally gnarly system-glue code. The libVF.io iommu setup code is a good example and inspires me to think that system-glue code doesn't need to be gross or impenetrable: https://github.com/Arc-Compute/LibVF.IO/blob/master/src/libv... Another one I've appreciated reading (and learned more about 2d graphics from) is Pixie, a 2d graphics library written in Nim. It's strongly affected how I write similar code. Here's the implementation of a fair subset of SVG paths: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/src/pixie/path... And one last one for basic algorithms which I'd use to teach intro to data structures any day: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/version-1-6/lib/pure/al... Of course Knuth's original code is still some of the bes

I recently helped work on a new open source JPEG decoder in Nim. (Over here on GitHub: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/src/pixie/file...) This video was extremely helpful to understand the "why" of all the things the spec was trying to explain. It made a huge difference in us being able to get things working. We talk a bit about JPEG and actually writing our decoder in Nim here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYwD7OynFcg Overall, our concluding opinion is that JPEG has some extremely cool and really smart ideas for how to compress images but the binary file format itself has some very painful things in it (progressive and restart markers as a couple examples).

I am working on OpenStreetMap renderer in Nim - see https://github.com/severak/lunarender3/ (but work somewhat stalled) I needed some language which is: - compiled to binaries - and really fast - has needed libraries (HTTP server, protocol buffers, sqlite and image generation) - it's easy to set up It was nice experience and Nim simply worked for my needs. People on Nim forum were nice and helped me when I ran into problems. It has nice and usable built-in library and I was really impressed by graphic library pixie - https://github.com/treeform/pixie I would use Nim again when I when I will see this application is suited for it (e.g. some command line apps).

> but not so small that there are no useful libraries written... Says the person responsible for a ton of really useful, well-done Nim libraries, such as this amazing Cairo/Skia-like library: https://github.com/treeform/pixie#readme Thank you for all the things you've made for Nim!

The proof is in the link! > Fast compile times: a full compiler rebuild takes ~12s (Rust: 15min, gcc: 30min+, clang: 1hr+, Go: 90s) [2]. The compiler is really big and self-hosted too. For large nim projects check out: https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer or https://github.com/treeform/pixie (personal faves).

Nim is the most readable language I've ever seen. I've dabbled with Go, but Nim is almost like pseudocodes+types. Highly recommend you take a look and try it out! You can use libraries like https://github.com/planety/prologue or https://github.com/treeform/pixie to create something quickly and fun(compile times are faaasst!). And Nim does not have a mandatory GC, you can go as low-level as you want, but in case you don't want that you can choose from several great GC's(a capable soft real-time GC and Boehm for example). Or you could combine the best of both worlds and take a look at the shiny fancy ARC/ORC deterministic memory management: https://nim-lang.org/blog/2020/10/15/introduction-to-arc-orc...

Here's an example of the Python produced by Genny: https://github.com/treeform/pixie-python/blob/master/src/pix... That Python is the output from this file: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/bindings/bindi... This is very new stuff for us but we really like the idea that we can generate comfortable bindings for many languages and never have to worry about method signatures or comments or default values getting out of sync with the C / shared lib interface.

For those using Python, we just got our Python bindings for Pixie up onto pip. Repo here https://github.com/treeform/pixie-python It's extremely fresh but our tests are working so consider giving it a try. For those interested in Nim's meta-programming, we're generating those Python bindings for Pixie from our Nim code using https://github.com/treeform/genny here https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/bindings/bindi... More languages in the works.

Dlang's betterC would be a good option for just a better-than-C language but looks like it doesn't support D's standard library [1]. That'd mean being stuck with plain C container libraries. :/ Personally, I was impressed by an approach taken by the authors of Pixie (a fast 2d library like Cairo) [2]. They created a "library wrapper" generator for Nim code that supports creating libraries Python, Node, C, and Nim itself that they call Genny [3]. Haven't tried it but being able to use Nim and it's ref based gc but still export to nice API's in other languages is fantastic. Pixie's aim is to be a Cairo alternative so it makes sense they'd need this. I hope the approach takes off. Usually writing any cross language API's is a lossy operation. Here's a sample of the API definition: exportObject Matrix3: constructor: matrix3