nanovg VS bgfx

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

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.

In fact, if using a modern graphics pipeline with shaders, you will actually have to learn how to draw a single rectangle to your screen, and then use that knowledge to draw (anti-aliased) lines, rectangles, arcs, circles, ellipses, etc. too. For instance, have a look at https://www.cairographics.org/ https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear https://github.com/memononen/nanovg and https://github.com/nical/lyon. There are probably also tutorials on how to draw vectorized graphics using OpenGL, Vulkan, etc.

What is your take on the underlying library NanoVG stating

In terms of other people's projects: stb, microui, and nanovg come to mind

My library uses nanovg, a canvas API on top of OpenGL, written in C and stb_truetype for font rasterization.

I think if you're not going to use an existing game engine, it makes sense to learn OpenGL and implement things yourself, or use something with the explicit goal of being a rendering abstraction like bgfx. It's more of a time commitment though, and sfml is much simpler and easier to get started with.

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

If you want juste a renderer, you can use BGFX, there is a zig binding that is not a third party.

Take a look at BGFX, sounds like its what you want. Its a cross platform graphics API that is low level like metal or opengl, however it treats opengl, metal, vulkan, etc as backends that u can compile to so you can write your code once and then compile to macos using metal as the backend, compile to web using webgl as the backend, compile for windows using directx as the backend etc etc. Its written in C++ but it has officially supported C bindings so you can use it with C no problem.

bgfx:https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx

BGFX

You can have a look at https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx

There are still things like BGFX in active development and use. I think the bigger issue is that folks can never really agree on how things should be abstracted for a higher level API.

u/LtJax already mentioned the Sokol library, another somewhat popular cross-platform rendering library is bgfx.

Maybe this