microui VS µWebSockets

There is also microui, which I like[0].

Which I forked to work with SDL2[1], no guarantees. It's fun to hack on.

[0]https://github.com/rxi/microui

[1]https://github.com/kennethrapp/microui

Otherwise, https://github.com/rxi/microui is small enough that you can hack around. Look at the issue though, there's a bit of unaligned access there.

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".

The price for the 'lightest' UI toolkit probably goes to microui:

https://github.com/rxi/microui

Just around 1100 lines of C code.

You need to bring your own renderer, but that's the same for Nuklear or Dear ImGui.

I wrote a WASM wrapper for the microui demo too:

https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/sgl-microui-sapp.html

Good C library list: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/links/libs https://github.com/Immediate-Mode-UI/Nuklear + C89, no dependencies, public license. 5/5 https://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/ + good tutorial and wiki guides 5/5 https://libsdl.org/ + infinite possibilities - whole library for making games, forums, wiki - complicated, not many C tutorials, need to manage game states... 4/5 https://github.com/lvgl/lvgl + good docs - for embedded systems 4/5 https://github.com/ocornut/imgui + Popular, inspired Nuklear - for C++ 3/5 https://docs.enlightenment.org/api/imlib2/html/ + very efficient, used in Conky - uses X so only for Linux, just for displaying images and text and stuff 2/5 https://github.com/rxi/microui + simple, small - you need to handle your own drawing 2/5 GTK+ - no

Really? Here's a minimal UI with I believe less LOC than Suckless DWM. It's not a full DE, but I imagine you could probably turn it into one without adding that much more code.

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