Vrmac VS nanovg

Couple times in the past I have implemented GPU-targeted GUI renderers, here’s an example: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac?tab=readme-ov-file#vector-... https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/Vrmac/Draw/VAA...

2D graphics have very little in common with game engines. The problem is very different in many regards. In 2D, you generally have Bezier and other splines on input, large amount of overdraw, textures coming from users complicate VRAM memory management. OTOH, game engines are solving hard problem which are irrelevant to 2D renderers, like dynamic lighting, volumetric effects, and dynamic environment.

> Part of Panama

Most real-live C APIs are using function pointers and/or complicated data structures. Here’s couple real-life examples defined by Linux kernel developers who made V4L2 API: [0], [1] The first of them contains a union in C version, i.e. different structures are at the same memory addresses. Note C# delivers the level of usability similar to C or C++: we simply define structures, and access these fields. Not sure this is gonna be easy in Java even after all these proposals arrive.

For a managed runtime, unmanaged interop is a huge feature which affects all levels of the stack: type system in the language for value types, GC to be able to temporarily pin objects passed to native code (making copies is prohibitively slow for use cases like video processing), code generator to convert managed delegates to C function pointers and vice versa, error handling to automatically convert between exceptions and integer status codes at the API boundary, and more. Gonna be very hard to add into the existing language like Java.

> "Vector API" JEP

That API is not good. They don’t expose hardware instructions, instead they have invented some platform-agnostic API and implemented graceful degradation.

This means the applicability is likely to be limited to pure vertical operations processing FP32 or FP64 numbers. The rest of the SIMD instructions are too different between architectures. A simple example in C++ is [2], see [3] for the context. That example is trivial to port to modern C#, but impossible to port to Java even after the proposed changes. The key part of the implementation is psadbw instruction, which is very specific to SSE2/AVX2 and these vector APIs don’t have an equivalent. Apart from reduction, other problematic operations are shuffles, saturating integer math, and some memory access patterns (gathers in AVX2, transposed loads/stores on NEON).

> most of these are not done / not in a stable LTS Java release yet

BTW, SIMD intrinsics arrived to C# in 2019 (.NET Core 3.0 released in 2019), and unmanaged interop support is available since the very first 1.0 version.

[0] https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/VrmacVideo/Lin...

[1] https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/master/VrmacVideo/Lin...

[2] https://gist.github.com/Const-me/3ade77faad47f0fbb0538965ae7...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36618344

I have minimal experience with Rust. OTOH, programming C++ for living since 2000, with a few gaps when I used other languages like Obj-C and C#.

I agree C++ is very hard to learn if you only have experience with higher-level languages like Python and Scala. I think there’re two reasons for that.

C++ is unsafe. There’s no way around this one, it was designed that way, like C or assembly. Still, with modern toolset it’s not terribly bad. Compilers print warnings, BTW I typically ask them to treat warnings as errors to deliberately fail the build. On Windows, a combination of debug build, debug C runtime, and visual studio debugger helps tremendously. Linux compilers have these sanitizers (address, memory, thread, undefined behavior) which are comparable, they too sacrifice runtime speed for diagnostics and debuggability.

Another reason, the language itself is very complicated, especially the templates. However, just because something is in the language doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to use it. You don’t need to be familiar with that stuff unless doing something very advanced, like customizing the Eigen C++ library. Don’t follow the patterns found in the standard library: unlike your code, that library has good reasons to use that template BS. If instead of templates you do something else, C++ becomes much easier to use, and most importantly other people will still be able to read and understand your code. Another reason to avoid excessive template metaprogramming, it slows down the compiler, because template-heavy code often needs to be in headers as opposed to cpp files.

P.S. If you don’t need extreme levels of performance (defined as “approach the numbers listed in CPU specs”, the numbers are FLOPS or memory bandwidth), and you don’t need the ecosystem too much, consider C# instead of C++. Much faster than Python, often faster than Scala or Java, easy integration with C should you need that (same as Rust, much easier than Python or Java), the only downside is these ~100MB of the runtime. The reputation is weird, but technically the language and runtime are pretty good. For example, here’s a C# library which re-implements a subset of ffmpeg and libavcodec C libraries: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo

BTW, I did that too for 32-bit ARM Linux on Raspberry Pi 4, back in 2020: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo Unlike Uno, my implementation doesn’t use libVLC and is written mostly in C#, only audio decoders are in C++. To decode video, I directly consume V4L2 Linux kernel APIs.

Doing that for decades.

An app for Windows phone, downloaded 140k times: https://github.com/Const-me/SkyFM

Cross-platform graphics library for .NET: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac

Recently, offline speech-to-text for Windows: https://github.com/Const-me/Whisper

At this point, I consider side projects like that as a hobby.

I think this needs much more complexity to be useful.

For the rendering, ideally it needs GPU support.

Input needs much more work, here's an overview for Windows: https://zserge.com/posts/fenster/

Windows' Sleep() function has default resolution 15.6ms, that's not enough for realtime rendering, and relatively hard to fix, ideally need a modern OS and a waitable timer created with high resolution flag.

Here's my attempt at making something similar, couple years ago: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac

I agree about Python or PHP.

However, for Java or modern C#, in my experience the performance is often fairly close. When using either of them, very often one doesn’t need C++ to be good enough.

Here’s an example, a video player library for Raspberry Pi4: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/tree/master/VrmacVideo As written on that page, just a few things are in C++ (GLES integration, audio decoders, and couple SIMD utility functions), the majority of things are in C#.

To be fair, in modern GL versions they fixed some of these things. In GLES 3.1 which I used a lot on Pi4 https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/ GPU vertex buffers and shaders worked fine, GLSL compiler in the drivers worked fine too.

However, others issues are still present. There’s no shaders bytecode, they have an extension to grab compiled shaders from GPU driver to cache on disk, but it doesn’t work. The only way to create shaders is separate compile and link API calls. Texture loading and binding API is still less than ideal.

I use nanovg for my projects and it works surprisingly well for its size. It integration is pretty simple .... if you know a little bit of OpenGL, otherwise there is a slight learning curve.

The "engine" is built on top of amazing https://www.lwjgl.org/ and https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx/, and UI system is baked by https://github.com/memononen/nanovg and https://github.com/facebook/yoga

It's a library for drawing vector shapes, sort of like SVG - https://github.com/memononen/nanovg The old way in the SDK was with GDI+, but the benefit of a vector format is scalability to higher resolutions and better GPU usage. The workaround potentially costs some frames, but its better than bust panels for now.

If you are a beginner in computer graphics, I strongly suggest you to look at the nanovg library: it contains all the primitives you might want to render (circles, lines, filled polygons, text, images, ...). Integrating it in existing codebase is not that hard, since the library is rather small.

NanoVG is the closest thing I came across when I had a similar quesiton: https://github.com/memononen/NanoVG

unfortunately it doesn't seem like it's getting steady updates now unlike the last time I checked. But I imagine it's pretty mature at this point. There also seem to be ports in Metal/DX11 if you didn't want to be stuck in OpenGL.

Also there's NanoVG if you really want a vector api in C, but don't need anti-aliased clipping.

Getting sufficient antialiasing quality for 2D graphics is difficult on GPUs. https://github.com/memononen/nanovg accomplishes this with GL2/GLES2 level hardware for most of the stuff one would want to render as part of a GUI. My project https://github.com/styluslabs/nanovgXC supports rendering arbitrary paths with exact coverage antialiasing, but requires GLES3.1 or GL4 level hardware for reasonable performance.

> to learn the 'nuts and bolts' of rendering

These nuts and bolts are very different between CPU and GPU. CPU-based libraries are painting pixels in bitmaps in system memory. Most GPU-based libraries are uploading indexed triangle meshes, and rendering them with weird shaders.

Worse, there're no good open source implementations of GPU-based ones. Microsoft ships an implementation as a part of OS (Direct2D) but it's not open source. Linux simply doesn't have an equivalent.

At least for initial versions, consider C interop with this https://github.com/memononen/nanovg It cuts a few corners (no cleartype for text, CPU overhead for repeated rendering of same static paths) but it's still good overall, simple, and easy to use.

> My only concern with C# is the cross compatibility

Works well on Linux, Windows and OSX, including ARM CPUs. Not sure about Android and iOS, never tested.

My largest concern with C# would be performance. Technically the language allows to code in any style, but most guides and examples are using OO-heavy one.