Very cool project. I followed some link’s to Max’s personal web site: a renaissance man!
Many decades ago when I worked on a C++ team we hired very smart but not C++ guru employees. I wrote a portable graphics library so team members could write X11 apps without learning details that domain experts really didn’t need to learn. With my company’s permission, I rewrote that code on my own time and added support for Mac, and Windows. That code became the two editions of my Portable GUIs with C++ books for McGraw-Hill.
Sorry to rant so much off topic, but mostly being retired now I have been thinking of getting back into C++ (I usually use Lisp languages and Python now). I think this very cool project will be the start of a few very fun days of playing with C++ again.
I loved your books. Very clearly written with complete, usable examples. Models of their kind. I remember very well going into Barnes & Noble and sitting there with the books for a couple of hours before buying them, because it was on my own nickel and books have never been cheap.
BTW, all of the eBooks I have written in the last ten years can be read for free (click on book, then ‘Free to Read Online). I try to keep them updated.
You probably want to use simd-optimized pixman[1] for rendering rectangles and glyphs. There is also luigi[2] which draws without opengl and written in C.
Such boilerfree graphics is important, for example for educational purpose where you don't want to be distracted by having to explain what an "allocator" or a "handle" are.
Also, to keep the core drawing code short so that it can be fully listed on a blog post or in a print magazine.
What I liked is is a self-sufficient set of files that compile immediately without any dependency issues (even on the Mac). There should be more work like
that:
It uses Microui lib written by rxi. Checkout other single header only C libs written by rxi[0]. They're really elegant C in my view.
[0] - https://github.com/rxi
This is great, particular the fenster side which is truly about as "If you remember Borland BGI or drawing things in QBASIC or INT 10h- you know what I mean" as I've ever seen for cross platform C.
Microui seems very cool as well but not in a "the comments section is very often longer than this code" sense. Still, I'll definitely be poking around with this a bit more for the novelty.
Does s7 allows for REPL-driven programming? That's the only thing missing from the Lua VM that can't be implemented as a library. An embedded Lisp that supports a true REPL would be a god-send.
> An embedded Lisp that supports a true REPL would be a god-send.
I might be misunderstanding your requirements; "embedded" can mean so many things these days. But what do you think of ECL (https://ecl.common-lisp.dev/main.html)?
Cool project! Graphics programming is _hard_ and anything to make it easier is welcome.
Maybe a dumb question, but why not Dear ImGui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui). "It's way too big and complex" is a completely reasonable answer, but I found it fantastic for debug menus, and there are a few applications that have used it as their _main_ GUI (Ship of Harkinian as an example).
I originally wanted to port dear imgui to fenster but that looked difficult and microui already had a very straightforward little bytecode to implement
Here's something I struggle with: where do I install the C libraries too and then how do you include them? I always want to try these really cool libs, but then I remember that although I know C well enough to try them, I've not solved the ecosystem and dependency management side of developing in C.
Readit News
Many decades ago when I worked on a C++ team we hired very smart but not C++ guru employees. I wrote a portable graphics library so team members could write X11 apps without learning details that domain experts really didn’t need to learn. With my company’s permission, I rewrote that code on my own time and added support for Mac, and Windows. That code became the two editions of my Portable GUIs with C++ books for McGraw-Hill.
Sorry to rant so much off topic, but mostly being retired now I have been thinking of getting back into C++ (I usually use Lisp languages and Python now). I think this very cool project will be the start of a few very fun days of playing with C++ again.
BTW, all of the eBooks I have written in the last ten years can be read for free (click on book, then ‘Free to Read Online). I try to keep them updated.
https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson
[1] https://github.com/freedesktop/pixman [2] https://github.com/nakst/luigi
Also, to keep the core drawing code short so that it can be fully listed on a blog post or in a print magazine.
What I liked is is a self-sufficient set of files that compile immediately without any dependency issues (even on the Mac). There should be more work like that:
- making it even easier to use
- making it simpler and simpler
- making it faster
- making the library footprint smaller
Thanks!
Microui seems very cool as well but not in a "the comments section is very often longer than this code" sense. Still, I'll definitely be poking around with this a bit more for the novelty.
Not sure how these facilities compare to Slime + Common Lisp.
[0]: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/snd/s7.html#repl
I might be misunderstanding your requirements; "embedded" can mean so many things these days. But what do you think of ECL (https://ecl.common-lisp.dev/main.html)?
Maybe a dumb question, but why not Dear ImGui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui). "It's way too big and complex" is a completely reasonable answer, but I found it fantastic for debug menus, and there are a few applications that have used it as their _main_ GUI (Ship of Harkinian as an example).
(Edit for fixing the name of the project)
Any suggested reading?