pixels VS advent-of-code-2020

https://github.com/parasyte/pixels

That gives you a simple software framebuffer, and it builds as a native app or for the web.

On a more recent machine, that same (well, more primitive) app with pixels or softbuffer struggled beyond acceptable. But was definitely poorly written.

I’ve ported the application from being based on pixels crate to the powerful bevy game engine

Well, it depends on how you use it; writing to an image buffer isn't much less efficient than writing to any normal buffer (in fact, although displaying your scene to a window efficiently is important, your main bottleneck will be the actual ray tracing loop). You may want to read this article for a practical example of using an ImageBuffer to create and draw a texture with Piston. Other window backends you could use, apart from pixels which was already mentioned in another comment, include minifb and Mini GL, though I haven't personally used them.

You can use wgpu instead of opengl as in the pixels example: https://github.com/parasyte/pixels/tree/main/examples/minimal-fltk

It might be possible but with a raycaster you probably want to be able to easily set all pixels and create your own small engine. Something like the pixels crate should fit your purpose: https://github.com/parasyte/pixels

The reality is that I have used unsafe that is also unsound out of convenience because fixing it is a papercut too many. And this tends to be common! I know enough to spot unsoundness in other projects (sometimes even early). But not enough to be confident in my own abilities to write sound unsafe code. Why? Because it's really flipping hard, that's why!

Also, if you just want to get-things-done, then https://github.com/parasyte/pixels might be a bit better, to avoid reinventing the wheel.

However, I recently got a new M2 Macbook Air and started noticing some super weird behavior. While playing Pokemon Silver with an unlocked framerate, I'd notice that the game would slow down to below 60FPS, even on a release build. After printing a little debugging info I found the culprit in the rendering logic which was handled by the MiniFB crate. At first I thought switching to a GPU renderer (such as https://github.com/parasyte/pixels) would help, and it... kinda did?

pixels uses wgpu and runs fine.

Another brilliant source which I've found is https://github.com/timvisee/advent-of-code-2020. Great inspirational use of iterators there.

Cool to see the itertools approach here though :) Link to the solution I saw before

Cool! My first time on TWIR with Solving Advent of Code 2020 in under a second. Though it isn't specifically about Rust, I did use Rust.

The use of a different data structure for the low and high side of the look up table made it faster as described here.

Oh yes, did Advent of Code in under a second last december, shameless plug 😎.