zippy VS pixie

Nothing is without the cons. I would say:

* Libraries: there is no NPM ecosystem to get anything you need.

* Stack-overflow: If you looking for a aswers there might not be anyone who encounters it before. You might have to dig really deep to find some thing.

* Some times you might run into a compiler bug usually related with performance of the generated code. Like it generates correct code bug it's slow for no reason and minor changes to the code make it fast again.

* Relying on OpenSSL especially v3 especially on windows is a big problem, but thats more on openSSL i think. I actually wrote a library around this that uses platforms HTTP/SSL instead: https://github.com/treeform/puppy

* Not having HTTP gzip support in standard library. You can always work around with zippy though: https://github.com/guzba/zippy

* async stack traces are really hard to read.

* not enough docs around the different ways to do threading. There is no one solution some times you want a quick thing, some times you are doing CPU tasks other times you are doing network tasks (where async is better). But many big languages struggle here, there is no one fits all threading solution.

It's definitely not style case insensitivity which everyone loves to bike-shed about.

One last example of Nim’s performance is taking a look at zlib. It has been around for so long and is used everywhere. It has to be as fast as possible, right? After all it uses SIMD and is very tight and battle test code. Well, then the Zippy library gets written in Nim and mostly beats or ties with zlib!

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