rust_minifb VS tiny-skia

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.

After watching the Numberphile video on this formula, I decided to implement it in Rust for fun. It uses minifb for the window creation + framebuffer.

Before I could implement the display output, I needed something to draw the images onto. There are quite a few Rust crates available to create a GUI window and update it with 2D graphics. Most of these are of course intended for making games, and also include ways of getting key presses as input, which I'll also need. I looked at Piston, which I've used before on other projects, Macroquad, which also supports web assembly as well as desktop targets, Pixels, which is intended specifically for 2D games, and Minifb, which is also specifically for 2D applications, but is much simpler. I also tried out libretro, which is specifically made for video game emulation, but I found it much more restrictive than the others because of it's narrow focus.

There's several different approaches you could take, but I'd probably suggest macroquad as the easiest. I've also used minifb for windowing + a drawing library like raqote or tiny-skia.

I don't know much about Rust, but I used the C version this library, and I think this is as simple as it gets: Rust MiniFB. Hope this helps

A very simple color manipulation library backed by a u32. My use-case was for use with minifb which uses a u32 frame buffer. Feedback appreciated.

If all you need is a pixel/frame buffer I'd suggest either pixels-rs or minifb.

In my experience, it really makes no difference what rendering backend you use for something as simple as a NES emulator. The 'pixel_renderer' that i wrote basically does the simplest possible thing i could think of - it takes a pixel buffer in cpu memory, copies it over to the gpu, turns it into a texture and stretches it to cover the entire screen. There seem to be many crates out there that do just this - my choice to roll my own was really one out of curiosity and completionism more than anything.

You can even check https://github.com/linebender/piet and https://github.com/RazrFalcon/tiny-skia. They are pure rust libraries. Skia as a whole is a big binary to add.

Looking through the source code. It looks like it's using tiny-skia for rendering.

Tiny Skia (https://github.com/RazrFalcon/tiny-skia) which is a slower Rust port of Skia and does all software rendering.

https://github.com/RazrFalcon/tiny-skia is pretty great.

I understand that this may sound harsh, but I also ported two (far bigger) codebases from C++ to Rust: rustybuzz and tiny-skia. Both of which are production -ready and not just prototypes. And mine not only do not use pointers, but also barely use unsafe in general.

Here is a real world implementation in tiny-skia: https://github.com/RazrFalcon/tiny-skia/blob/master/src/pipeline/highp.rs

How about tiny-skia?

How about tiny-skia? Almost the same performance as C, no unsafe, a lot of explicit SIMD.

Now I would love to see a universal Bezier path crate, storage + common utilities like length, point at offset, some low-level stuff, etc. So it could be used as a foundation for other crates. Currently, there is a lot of friction because each crate has its own implementation.

Nice to see tiny-skia in use.