pixels VS emscripten

Compare pixels vs emscripten and see what are their differences.

pixels

A tiny hardware-accelerated pixel frame buffer. 🦀 (by parasyte)

emscripten

Emscripten: An LLVM-to-WebAssembly Compiler (by emscripten-core)
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pixels emscripten
33 20
1,688 25,171
- 0.4%
4.9 9.9
about 2 months ago about 3 hours ago
Rust C++
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

pixels

Posts with mentions or reviews of pixels. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-15.
  • A minimal working Rust / SDL2 / WASM browser game
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    https://github.com/parasyte/pixels

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

  • How do rust gui frameworks avoid rerendering?
    2 projects | /r/rust | 6 Jul 2023
    On a more recent machine, that same (well, more primitive) app with pixels or softbuffer struggled beyond acceptable. But was definitely poorly written.
  • Announcing lavagna v2, a collaborative blackboard made with bevy and WebRTC
    5 projects | /r/rust | 22 May 2023
    I’ve ported the application from being based on pixels crate to the powerful bevy game engine
  • placing pixels
    4 projects | /r/rust_gamedev | 15 May 2023
    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.
  • Considerations for Power Draw with egui
    12 projects | /r/rust | 19 Apr 2023
    You can use wgpu instead of opengl as in the pixels example: https://github.com/parasyte/pixels/tree/main/examples/minimal-fltk
  • Is Macroquad suitable for making games like Wolfenstein RPG?
    1 project | /r/rust_gamedev | 14 Apr 2023
    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
  • I love rust, I have a pet peeve with the community
    7 projects | /r/rust | 1 Mar 2023
    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!
  • [WGPU][GLFW][HELP]
    2 projects | /r/rust_gamedev | 12 Feb 2023
    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.
  • How to prevent performance drops affecting my Game Boy emulator when running on M1/M2 Macs?
    3 projects | /r/rust | 25 Nov 2022
    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?
  • Simple way to draw a pixel at coordinates
    2 projects | /r/rust_gamedev | 19 Nov 2022
    pixels uses wgpu and runs fine.

emscripten

Posts with mentions or reviews of emscripten. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-30.
  • Python HTTP library 'urllib3' now works in the browser
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2024
    Browsers limit the ability for these platforms to use raw sockets, there simply is no API for it. The best that can be done /today/ is to use WebSockets, which are not the same thing any can't be used for HTTP requests without the server expecting a WebSocket connection:

    https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/5196#is...

  • A minimal working Rust / SDL2 / WASM browser game
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    Only half true. Emscripten implements the SDL 1.2 (and also SDL_mixer 1.2) API in Javascript here: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/blob/main/src/.... On the other hand SDL 2 (and SDL_mixer 2) are proper ports (which you linked to).

    So there's quite a size penalty to using SDL 2 rather than SDL 1.2.

  • Playing with low-level memory in WebAssembly
    2 projects | dev.to | 5 Sep 2023
    Playing with low-level stuff is fun, but I won't use it anywhere in productionable code. Well, at least without considerable experience and understanding of the Emscripten code base.
  • Keeping Figma Fast: perf-testing the WASM editor
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Aug 2023
    Thank you for your comment!

    WASM gave Figma a lot of speed by default for a lot of perf-sensitive code like rendering, layouts, applying styles and materializing component instances, our GUI code is mostly React and CSS.

    WASM engine performance has not been a problem for us, instead we are constantly looking forward improvements in the devex department: debugging, profiling and modularization.

    One of the largest challenges of the platform we face today is the heap size limit. While Chrome supports up to 4GB today, that's not yet the case for all browsers. And even with that, we are still discovering bugs in the toolchain (see this recent issue filed by one of our engineers) https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/20137

    The challenge of the perf-testing at scale in our company is helping developers to detect perf regressions when they don't expect them - accidental algorithmic errors, misused caches, over-rendering React components, dangerously inefficient CSS directives, etc.

  • Show HN: Classic FPS Wolfenstein 3D brought in the browser via Emscripten
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Mar 2023
    https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes/tree/main/recipe...

    Re: emscripten fs implementations: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/15041#i... https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite/issues/315

  • Hello World In Web Assembly
    4 projects | dev.to | 12 Feb 2023
    Moving onto the project, let’s first install Emscripten from their git repository. Emscripten will compile C into Wasm code. An important note is that I will be using Mac OS for this project. If you want to follow along using Windows, use this link. To Begin, open your terminal and clone down Emscripten with:
  • Emscripten: An LLVM-to-WebAssembly Compiler
    1 project | /r/coolgithubprojects | 3 Jan 2023
  • GDExtension step-by-step tutorial
    1 project | /r/godot | 6 Dec 2022
    I got pointed to this one here: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/15487
  • Question about usage on a chromebook
    4 projects | /r/i2p | 30 Nov 2022
    If you want to do it, go to town. This is the only reference I could find to anybody targeting wasm with i2pd frankly I really hope the person inquiring in the issue is also you.
  • The Reason Java Is Still Popular
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Sep 2022
    Right, and if that momentum is going to last 20 years, then that's going to dictate what's a good strategic decision and what isn't for the next 20 years. Thanks for letting me know what the good options might be when my infant daughter is halfway through college, that doesn't help me save for it in the meantime.

    Prior familiarity is a very good reason to pick an option for a greenfield project if you're operating on any type of serious budget (time or money), especially if you need to hire others to help out. There's also the annoying reality that most libraries for new/up-and-coming languages are simply inadequate, despite whatever claims they make.

    For instance, one of my personal side projects involves getting familiar with WebAssembly (note: not on a serious budget), and I'm using emscripten to transcode because that's what the internet seemed to think was the closest thing to a standard toolkit. I found a bug simply by combining two pieces of example code from Emscripten's own documentation (you'll note I'm transcoding from c++ due to prior familiarity): https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/issues/17143

    This is not a dig on emscripten per se, merely pointing out that it's probably not mature enough for the stress of corporate-scale development, where you encounter all sorts of crazy edge cases well beyond the sample code. Java over the years has obtained that level of maturity. The edge cases are largely solved or at least known, and there's an army of experts and consultants ready to help if there's a problem. When time is money, that matters. It determines the risk profile of any project, greenfield or otherwise.

    Java's momentum hasn't stopped, at best it's simply slowing. And at this rate it'll take decades to come to a stop, and decades more to recede to any meaningful degree. I'll also point out that C is very much alive and well in the embedded world. Plenty of job postings looking for C experience explicitly.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing pixels and emscripten you can also consider the following projects:

macroquad - Cross-platform game engine in Rust.

pyodide - Pyodide is a Python distribution for the browser and Node.js based on WebAssembly

bevy - A refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust

compute-shader-101 - Sample code for compute shader 101 training

rust-sfml - SFML bindings for Rust

wasm-libxml2 - A quick experiment to build and run libxml2 as a WebAssembly module.

miniquad - Cross platform rendering in Rust

fengari - 🌙 φεγγάρι - The Lua VM written in JS ES6 for Node and the browser

ggez - Rust library to create a Good Game Easily

GodotSteam - An open-source and fully functional Steamworks SDK / API module and plug-in for the Godot Game Engine.

rust_minifb - Cross platfrom window and framebuffer crate for Rust

beatmapper - A 3D editor for creating Beat Saber maps