pixie VS LiteDB

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

Personally, I used to use LiteDB which is a NoSQL version which in v4 paired very nicely with F# thanks to Zaid's lovely LiteDB.FSharp library. Sadly, when v5 showed up, a lot of the F# niceties were lost given how the API was changed and v5 was not very F# friendly. You can still use it of course but you fall back to more unsafe F# code which is not ideal.

Maybe you want LiteDB? I don't think you need to write SQL, you can interact with the API.

Are you aware of LiteDB? It seems like your project is going for a very similar niche. Most people looking for this type of thing will probably go for the more mature and feature-rich solution (LiteDB). So if your project has some unique value proposition to distinguish it from LiteDB, you should elaborate on that.

Please consider using the primary key to generate an unique value on the db side.

LiteDB

Before checking this out, people might want to take a look through the issues and pull requests of which there are 500+ and 50+ respectively [1]. I was really optimistic about this project and it was headed in a great direction, but it's not in a production ready state, and it seems that the main guy behind it has decided to move onto other things. It's been about a year since there was any significant activity.

I just mention this because a lot of these little issues might only become more apparent after integrating the db into your project and so it can be a bit annoying. I ended up swapping to Linq2DB [1]. It's something, more or less, similar offering an ORM/LINQ type system as well as the ability to also use direct SQL if desired. But the neat thing is that it also uses a standardized API for the LINQ query language, so you can do things like swap from SQLite to PostgreSQL in one* line of code, so long as you're not using any provider specific extensions.

[1] - https://github.com/mbdavid/LiteDB

[2] - https://github.com/linq2db/linq2db

A mature NoSQL embedded/flatfile database like LiteDB would be nice. There are some similar Rust libraries but they aren't very close to production ready and the API tends to not be too user friendly. I had trouble finding one of these for a small app I had to write recently.