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Top 23 Graphic Open-Source Projects
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Yes. diagrams.net is a strong choice for Google Cloud architecture diagrams when the goal is documentation, design reviews, and manual architecture communication rather than live infrastructure discovery.
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If you want to play with software rendering, here's probably the shortest code that will get an ARGB8888 2D array from main memory to the screen efficiently for all platforms using SDL2 in C https://gist.github.com/CoryBloyd/6725bb78323bb1157ff8d4175d... you'll need to do the translation from a 320x200x8-bit palletized framebuffer to ARGB yourself ;)
If you want to get inspired by what can be done with palletized framebuffers check out http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ (click Show Options) and the GDC presentation by the artist https://youtu.be/aMcJ1Jvtef0
With that you can fire up https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter for that classic Deluxe Paint IIe vibe. Or, https://www.aseprite.org/ for something more modern.
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Graphite
Open source comprehensive 2D content creation tool suite for graphic design, digital art, and interactive real-time motion graphics — featuring node-based procedural editing
I'm going to hold on my Affinity as long as I can and try to integrate as much of my workflow to Inkscape as possible (even if UI feels like CorelDraw). Also keeping eye on: https://graphite.rs/
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Project mention: LVGL Kft switches to freemium; begins closing modules | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-03-06
LVGL has begun removing modules from trunk and closing them under licensing fees.
On GitHub, LVGL Kft accuse developers using the pre-closure MIT licensed XML module of IP theft: https://github.com/lvgl/lvgl/issues/9663#issuecomment-384163...
Have to read the commit history here: before last October the XML component was MIT licensed, then it was relicensed as proprietary, then removed, then someone appears to have forked an older version.
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I got this itch too when I came across tinyrenderer [1] and worked through the early lessons through shading, but didn't quite finish the texture mapping yet [2]. It was fun to work in pure C from first principles, even side-questing to write a simple TGA file reader and writer.
I'd be very interested to see your tutorial when it's done!
[1] https://haqr.eu/tinyrenderer
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p5.js
p5.js is a client-side JS platform that empowers artists, designers, students, and anyone to learn to code and express themselves creatively on the web. It is based on the core principles of Processing. Looking for p5.js 2.0? http://beta.p5js.org
P5.js is pretty great.
I used it create art, basically taking animal photos and using the dna sequence from that animal to recreate the photo using the 4 letters. (I did four passes using different size letters and layered in Gimp). People seem to like them, and they got into an art:science show.
https://p5js.org/
Coding train has a lot of videos on using p5.js
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Thank you! And yes, roughViz is really great!
https://roughjs.com/ is another cool library to create a similar style, although not chart focused.
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filament
Filament is a real-time physically based rendering engine for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, macOS, and WebGL2 (by google)
Project mention: Toyota Fluorite: "console-grade" Flutter game engine | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-02-11It does look like Filament has a web target:
https://github.com/google/filament
but if they're targeting embedded systems, maybe they haven't prioritized a public web demo yet. If the bulk of the project is actually in C++, making a web demo probably involves a whole WASM side-quest. I suspect there's a different amount of friction between "I wanna open source this cool project we're doing" and "I wanna build a rendering target we won't use to make the README look better."
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3d-game-shaders-for-beginners
🎮 A step-by-step guide to implementing SSAO, depth of field, lighting, normal mapping, and more for your 3D game.
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Mojs - Screen density independent effects look good on any device
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awesome-python-applications
💿 Free software that works great, and also happens to be open-source Python.
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Project mention: Getting Started with 2D Games Using Pyxel (Part 1): Introduction | dev.to | 2026-01-05
Pyxel is a game engine that makes it easy to handle things like character rendering, movement, and collision detection. It is especially recommended for those who love retro-style games.
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bgfx
Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library.
Project mention: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-02-18 -
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DearPyGui
Dear PyGui: A fast and powerful Graphical User Interface Toolkit for Python with minimal dependencies
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> There are frameworks and libraries that handle 100% of clipboard OS specifics
They're sufficient in many cases, but you'll still sometimes need the control of working with COM/etc. directly, and those libraries don't fully save you from platform-specific bugs (e.g: https://github.com/glfw/glfw/issues/2644).
> the app in question has no use for system clipboard in the first place
What do you expect to happen when you copy some text from an external editor into a text field?
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Konva
Konva.js is an HTML5 Canvas JavaScript framework that extends the 2d context by enabling canvas interactivity for desktop and mobile applications.
For the developers here: it's built with Vue 3, with the visualizations drawn on canvas using Konva. Each algorithm produces a list of steps up front, and the player just renders whichever step you're on — which is what makes stepping back and scrubbing work. The pages are statically prerendered so they load quickly and are reasonably friendly to search engines.
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Project mention: MonoGame: A .NET framework for making cross-platform games | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-03-07
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Project mention: Show HN: Algorithmic String Art, accessible to all | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-22
Utterly fascinating. I could play with this for hours.
Reminds me a bit of generative images using basic shapes (triangles, ellipses, etc) by Fogleman [1] - but ofcourse this is different.
[1]: https://github.com/fogleman/primitive
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
Graphics discussion
Graphics related posts
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Wgpu v30
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Render a PDF to an image in .NET — with a pure-C# PDF engine
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Building a GPU-accelerated screen recorder in Rust with wgpu
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Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps
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Making Graphics Like it's 1993
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DaVinci Resolve 21
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Sp.h is the standard library that C deserves
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 11 Jul 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Graphic projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | drawio-desktop | 62,057 |
| 2 | aseprite | 37,881 |
| 3 | raylib | 33,758 |
| 4 | iced | 30,903 |
| 5 | Graphite | 26,506 |
| 6 | lvgl | 24,000 |
| 7 | tinyrenderer | 23,802 |
| 8 | p5.js | 23,789 |
| 9 | rough | 20,936 |
| 10 | filament | 20,241 |
| 11 | 3d-game-shaders-for-beginners | 19,705 |
| 12 | Mo.js | 18,721 |
| 13 | awesome-python-applications | 17,831 |
| 14 | pyxel | 17,571 |
| 15 | wgpu | 17,514 |
| 16 | bgfx | 17,249 |
| 17 | awesome-design | 17,245 |
| 18 | DearPyGui | 15,500 |
| 19 | GLFW | 15,149 |
| 20 | Konva | 14,607 |
| 21 | MonoGame | 14,107 |
| 22 | Primitive Pictures | 13,136 |
| 23 | G2 | 12,560 |
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