static-haskell-nix VS nanovg

Using Nix: https://github.com/nh2/static-haskell-nix

To debug this type of problem (I have to debug linker errors regularly as part of static-haskell-nix):

In static-haskell-nix there is currently this PR to enable support for that: https://github.com/nh2/static-haskell-nix/pull/108

I think there's a misunderstanding: Most people want to use the .a file from their Linux/package distro that provides static libraries, such as Alpine Linux or nixpkgs.

Such package distributions just use the build system default options to build static libs. For example, Alpine might use `-Ddefault_library=both`.

> if they could keep that libgtk_static around

Why make these special cases instead of just using the build system defaults? That's easier to maintain and more obvious.

> I'd be interested to hear if static linking GTK even has that many benefits

One benefit is almost-infinite backwards compatibility that the Linux and Xorg ABIs provide, being able to make GUI apps that work out of the box everywhere.

Another is that these generated executables are very small, e.g. 12 MB for a full static GTK GUI app [1], or 6 MB when xz-compressed.

This is much less than when using shared libraries. One reason is that dead-code elimination works much better for static linking: It links in only the functions you actually use. For dynamic linking, it's always the entire .so.

[1] https://github.com/nh2/static-haskell-nix/releases/tag/c-sta...

GTK can be statically linked.

Example executable:

https://github.com/nh2/static-haskell-nix/releases/tag/c-sta...

It lost this ability temporarily when switching to Meson, but I fixed it in GTK3 and GTK4. But I just checked and apparently it is broken again:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3774#note_109746...

I use nanovg for my projects and it works surprisingly well for its size. It integration is pretty simple .... if you know a little bit of OpenGL, otherwise there is a slight learning curve.

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

It's a library for drawing vector shapes, sort of like SVG - https://github.com/memononen/nanovg The old way in the SDK was with GDI+, but the benefit of a vector format is scalability to higher resolutions and better GPU usage. The workaround potentially costs some frames, but its better than bust panels for now.

If you are a beginner in computer graphics, I strongly suggest you to look at the nanovg library: it contains all the primitives you might want to render (circles, lines, filled polygons, text, images, ...). Integrating it in existing codebase is not that hard, since the library is rather small.

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.