minifb VS raytracer-exp

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 took a bit of time over the summer to familiarize myself with the language by writing a (super simple) ray tracer.

https://github.com/mschaef/rust-rt

After spending as much time lately as I have in Scala and Python, my immediate reaction to Rust was quite positive. Python has performance issues from 1985 and the build ecosystem seems borderline chaotic. (Made me seriously miss Maven, etc.) Scala seems a lot like C++ - an amazing intellectual accomplishment, a great place to spend all of your time, but not so good as a part time language. (I spend a bunch of my time in Scala mentally expanding out shorthand notation the way I might be mentally macroexpanding in a Lisp.)

Rust, in contrast, seems to have struck a nice balance between expressive power and runtime performance. Expressively, it has a lot of what I like about Scala with a syntax that makes more sense to my C-style upbringing. Performance seems to be everything I'd expect from the fully compiled language that it is. (In terms of performance, there's no way Python would've let me get away with some of what I got away with in my Rust ray tracer.)

Given that the language gave such a positive initial impression, the questions I still have are more about what it feels like in the large. ie: Working with a significantly sized team jointly on a codebase that might last 1, 5, 10 or more years. (Even then, I'm pretty optimistic.)