cimgui VS µWebSockets

I would recommend C bindings for the Dear ImGui (https://github.com/cimgui/cimgui)

For GUI, there are lots, most well-known of course being Dear Imgui, for which people have made auto-generated C bindings. Another mature but a lot simpler option is Nuklear, as others have mentioned. Even more minimalistic (it's just 1KLOC) is microui. There are a lot more, just google "imgui library c".

DearIMGUI has both an unofficial C wrapper and a new official C binding generator. I have personally used the CIMGUI wrapper with C99 apps using the Direct3D11 backend and it works great. The new API is started by the DearIMGUI creator but is still adding features that are available in CIMGUI.

Unofficial C API - https://github.com/cimgui/cimgui

I would give ImGui a look, it is technically a c++ api, but there is a plain c version https://github.com/cimgui/cimgui/tree/docking_inter which is a free cross platform gui toolset

Whilst this is great. I have a (slightly dumb) question -What advantage does using these bindings give us over just using the generated C IMGUI bindings (cimgui) directly in Zig??Especially given the fact that that the latter are autogenerated from the original C++ IMGUI.

cimgui

This is worth a look: https://github.com/cimgui/cimgui

Dear ImGui is a C++ library, however a C port exists.

Explore GUI frameworks for C Here's another and another

They use (uWebSockets)[https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets], which was written in C++, but has an interface to use in NodeJS. It's been really performant for me in my simple tests compared to other popular websocket libs that slow down fairly quickly.

µWebSockets, pronounced as "microWebSocket”, is a WebSocket library written in C++ and has Node.js bindings. Its design focuses on being efficient and scalable, making it ideal for applications that require high concurrency and low latency.

You can do that with any single threaded library that leaves threading to you. Like for example https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets

Websockets are also pretty valuable for updating the page in real time, there are servers in many languages. I'm a big fan of https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets which is C++ but also has JS bindings to use with Node.js.

Can you include uWebsockets? https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets

μWebSockets Génial, rapide, peut transformer l’eau en vin. Nécessite C++17.

Not exaclty -- it looks like it's pretty overkill for my needs

I'm looking for something more like websocketpp[0], or even just grpc without a requisite proxy. uWebsockets looks really promising, being header only, but in the fine print requires a runtime library. unfortunately, none of that ecosystem seems to use cmake, making integrating it that much more of a pain.

why use cpp for this, I'm sure some HNer will ask. the ray tracer itself is using cuda, that's why. I've also debated

- running it as a grpc server and having some proxy in a more web-accessible language

- creating python bindings and using python to make a websocket/http server for it

neither of those are out of the question, but they're not my first choices, because I'd like to keep the build & execution simple. introducing dependencies, especially other executables, is in conflict with that.

i don't need anything particularly scalable -- a threaded implementation, or one using select() would be fine, if not preferable.

[0] https://docs.websocketpp.org/

[1] https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets

Really cool i also made and CAPI for using WebSocket in C, https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets/tree/master/capi

I will take a deep look on your project thanks for sharing!

We discover a really fast, small, and well maintained C++ Library called uNetworking/uWebSockets, but no C API available, so we create and adapt the full C API from uNetworking/uWebSockets and will integrate libuv powered fetch and file IO, this same C API is used by Bun