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“Minimal code to put pixels on the screen?” is a question I’ve seen often enough that I’ve made a little gist to link whenever it comes up. https://gist.github

“Minimal code to put pixels on the screen?” is a question I’ve seen often enough that I’ve made a little gist to link whenever it comes up. https://gist.github.com/CoryBloyd/6725bb78323bb1157ff8d4175d42d789 https://gist.github.com/CoryBloyd/6725bb78323bb1157ff8d4175d... It requires https://www.libsdl.org/ https://www.libsdl.org/ But, making a window and putting some pixels in it, on all the world’s varied platforms, is the premier feature of that lib.

shmerl 5y ago
Yeah, I figured you could use SDL. But probably more interesting to do it more directly with Rust and some WSI functions to get the needed surface (though it would be a lot more code).
signa11 5y ago
with multithreaded rendering, is it possible to use SDL ? anecdotally, in my cpu based ray-tracers (i have one in c++ and python so far) , i have found that SDL based rendering causes noticeable slowdowns to become quite useless after the initial novelty wears off.
- corysama 5y ago
  I've checked the code under the hood of SDL and it does pretty much the best you can do for fast uploads of an image from the CPU to the GPU. My CPU-based ray tracer uses the code I linked. SDL_LockTexture, go wide with threads writing into the locked buffer, SDL_UnlockTexture. If I skip the actual ray tracing, I get 1400 FPS uploading a 1024x1024 image.
svdree 5y ago
MiniFB is also nice for this purpose: https://github.com/emoon/minifb https://github.com/emoon/minifb
boomlinde 5y ago
When I want a quick way to get pixels on the screen I just print a PPM image to stdout and pipe my program into `feh -`. There are two PPM formats, both very simple: http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ppm.html http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ppm.html For example, the header printf("P6\n%lu %lu\n255\n", width, height); followed by width*height triplets of raw bytes representing the RGB values of each pixel.

shmerl 5y ago

Yeah, I figured you could use SDL. But probably more interesting to do it more directly with Rust and some WSI functions to get the needed surface (though it would be a lot more code).

signa11 5y ago

with multithreaded rendering, is it possible to use SDL ? anecdotally, in my cpu based ray-tracers (i have one in c++ and python so far) , i have found that SDL based rendering causes noticeable slowdowns to become quite useless after the initial novelty wears off.

corysama 5y ago
I've checked the code under the hood of SDL and it does pretty much the best you can do for fast uploads of an image from the CPU to the GPU. My CPU-based ray tracer uses the code I linked. SDL_LockTexture, go wide with threads writing into the locked buffer, SDL_UnlockTexture. If I skip the actual ray tracing, I get 1400 FPS uploading a 1024x1024 image.

svdree 5y ago

MiniFB is also nice for this purpose: https://github.com/emoon/minifb https://github.com/emoon/minifb

boomlinde 5y ago

When I want a quick way to get pixels on the screen I just print a PPM image to stdout and pipe my program into `feh -`. There are two PPM formats, both very simple: http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ppm.html http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ppm.html For example, the header printf("P6\n%lu %lu\n255\n", width, height); followed by width*height triplets of raw bytes representing the RGB values of each pixel.