pixie VS Arraymancer

We have written pixie: https://github.com/treeform/pixie . Pixie is a 2D graphics library similar to Cairo and Skia written entirely in Nim. Which I think is a big accomplishment. It even has python bindings: https://pypi.org/project/pixie-python/

I made it because I really like pixie/boxy/windy combo, but there is no gamepad support built-in.

With Nim, you can continuously optimize and improve the hot spots in your code. For example, in the Pixie graphics library, path filling started with floating point code, switched to floating point SIMD, then to 16-bit integer SIMD. Finally, this SIMD was written for both x86 and ARM.

The author Fidget actually has a number of other great libraries that are part of the rendering stack. Notably, Pixie for text and shape rendering in 2D, Boxy for rendering textures to the GPU via opengl, and then Windy for an OS window context and user events, and a number of other libraries related to 3D rendering.

Perhaps not the "best" source code I've ever read, but libVF.io had some beautiful code for what's generally gnarly system-glue code. The iommu setup code is a good example and inspires me to think that system-glue code doesn't need to be gross or impenetrable: https://github.com/Arc-Compute/LibVF.IO/blob/master/src/libv...

Another one I've appreciated reading (and learned more about 2d graphics from) is Pixie, a 2d graphics library written in Nim. Here's the implementation of a fair subset of SVG paths: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/src/pixie/path...

And one last one for basic algorithms: https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/blob/version-1-6/lib/pure/al...

Of course Knuth's original code is still some of the best classic code. K&R's original C book is a classic.

I recently helped work on a new open source JPEG decoder in Nim. (Over here on GitHub: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/src/pixie/file...)

This video was extremely helpful to understand the "why" of all the things the spec was trying to explain. It made a huge difference in us being able to get things working.

We talk a bit about JPEG and actually writing our decoder in Nim here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYwD7OynFcg

Overall, our concluding opinion is that JPEG has some extremely cool and really smart ideas for how to compress images but the binary file format itself has some very painful things in it (progressive and restart markers as a couple examples).

I am working on OpenStreetMap renderer in Nim - see https://github.com/severak/lunarender3/ (but work somewhat stalled)

I needed some language which is:

- compiled to binaries

- and really fast

- has needed libraries (HTTP server, protocol buffers, sqlite and image generation)

- it's easy to set up

It was nice experience and Nim simply worked for my needs. People on Nim forum were nice and helped me when I ran into problems. It has nice and usable built-in library and I was really impressed by graphic library pixie - https://github.com/treeform/pixie

I would use Nim again when I when I will see this application is suited for it (e.g. some command line apps).

> but not so small that there are no useful libraries written...

Says the person responsible for a ton of really useful, well-done Nim libraries, such as this amazing Cairo/Skia-like library: https://github.com/treeform/pixie#readme

Thank you for all the things you've made for Nim!

A 2d graphics library like Nim’s pixie

It is a small DSL written using macros at https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer/blob/master/src/array....

Nim has pretty great meta-programming capabilities and arraymancer employs some cool features like emitting cuda-kernels on the fly using standard templates depending on backend !

Nim has also a powerful deep learning library called Arraymancer. It's selling point is that you don't have to rewrite your code from research to production. It's used in various machine learning projects, but one recent one that caught my eye was https://github.com/amkrajewski/nimCSO "Composition Space Optimization"

https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer

- https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer/blob/master/src/array...

It's worth noting that nim async/await transformation is fully implemented as a library in macros.

https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer 11. « Premature optimisation is the root of all evil », Donald Knuth, The art of computer Programming It would be quite useful that someone writes one with examples for all these recommendations and more ...

In particular for deep learning as bobsyourunkl already mentioned there is arraymancer on the one hand and also flambeau on the other. The latter is a Nim wrapper around libtorch (i.e. the PyTorch C++ backend). It is missing things (to be wrapped by adding a few lines) and has some rough edges, but if one needs to get stuff done, it's possible.

how are u compiling (optimization, custom compilation flags etc.?) In my case https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer big project compile under your 4.2s so or you have like 10k+ lines of codes with macros or you just pass some debug flags to compiler :D

We have both raw wrappers for BLAS:

https://github.com/andreaferretti/nimblas

as well as LAPACK:

https://github.com/andreaferretti/nimlapack

For an example, consider calling the least squares routine `dgelsd` in arraymancer:

https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer/blob/master/src/array...

wrapped up in a nicer user facing API.

Feel free to hop onto matrix, if you have more questions!