minifb VS deadfrog-lib

I would also recommend looking into SDL2 or MiniFB for cross-platform support, as not everyone uses X11.

MiniFB is what you want for this.

MiniFB maybe?

But you can have a skeleton program that sets up framebuffer for you (e.g. with minifb or TIGR), then link it that skeleton with your code (in assembly or whatever you prefer).

I also saw minifb, which seems like a really to-the-point way to get a buffer I can draw to., so I guess I will go in that direction (rust lib, make FFI bindings for deno, etc.)

If you just want to push pixel data to a frame buffer then I can highly recommend minifb. MIT licensed, Supports a lot of platforms, and it’s about as simple as you can get. It also handles input if you need it, too.

I think this library will fit your goals: https://github.com/emoon/minifb

I think the Xlib dependency would prevent compilation as an αpε. I put some effort into doing X11 from scratch (without Xlib or Xcb) to make this possible. Or at least, my aim was to be able to build with musl libc and generate a single executable that would run on many different Linuxes.

https://github.com/abainbridge/deadfrog-lib/blob/master/src/.... It is janky though.

Having a bitmap in normal system memory that we can write to the window or screen is easy though and should be more widely supported. Once you've got that you can write pixels, lines, rectangles, mandlebrots etc very easily and building up to a GUI toolkit is also quite easy and fun. This mechanism is fast enough for pretty much everything other than games on modern hardware.

I consider GPU acceleration a form of premature optimization - it adds complexity unnecessarily in many cases.

Here's my library for doing that on Windows and X11. https://github.com/abainbridge/deadfrog-lib