Olive.c: a simple graphics library that does not have any dependencies

Nice! PortableGL is also great, OpenGL api that is defined in entirely in C and writes the “framebuffer” into an SDL window<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rswinkle&#x2F;PortableGL" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rswinkle&#x2F;PortableGL</a>

Nice to see tsoding on the top of HN, this guy does amazing streams and youtube video

The combination of mapping pixels to memory and rendering individually and then that appearing on webgl and looking great on a not too expensive phone, where I am pinch zooming while it flawlessly animates, sort of blows my mind in how much technology has come in 25 years. Connects the old with the new in a way I haven’t seen for a while (and yeah seen loads of C64 emulators and such)

The TODO section at the end of olive.c shows that there&#x27;s lots more to do, and decisions to make about how much to do (e.g. what about bezier curves?), but that&#x27;s quibbling: it is refreshing (and educational) to see everything here done in such a perfectly self-contained way. Godspeed!

I also found this Cairo-like vector graphics library that runs in a shader interesting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shadertoy.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;lslXW8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shadertoy.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;lslXW8</a>

Idea for improvement: avoiding color blending in sRGB. A first step would be to work in linear space.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tsoding&#x2F;olive.c&#x2F;blob&#x2F;43a67dd76760f915516a5e8e2529ec46dcdf1f22&#x2F;olive.c#L270-L287" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tsoding&#x2F;olive.c&#x2F;blob&#x2F;43a67dd76760f915516a...</a>

<i>The name is pronounced as &quot;olivets&quot; which is a Ukrainian word for &quot;pencil&quot; (&quot;олівець&quot;).</i><p>From the readme.

Years ago, i made something similar as a coursework (Computer Graphics)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rtnF14&#x2F;ComputerGraphics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rtnF14&#x2F;ComputerGraphics</a>

Please do note that it is in an extremely early stage of development, so if it may seem raw and unpolished, it is because it is.

Cool project! What’s the motivation? Since it eschews any graphics API, is it safe to assume this only does CPU-based rendering?

This is so nice. It feels a bit like Logo using C syntax - I love that it&#x27;s totally safe to run software written in this in a browser thanks to WebAssembly.

I started something superficially similar but for SVG in an intro C class: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;davecom&#x2F;SuperSimpleGraphics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;davecom&#x2F;SuperSimpleGraphics</a>

Looks great but the API itself doesn&#x27;t seem very innovative (which is probably not the goal anyway).<p>I&#x27;d personally be interested in a graphics API that do not try to render the whole buffer every frame, but update it given a list of changes (e.g. sprite moving&#x2F;rotating). I believe that such approach could work very well for a 2D software renderer given the likeliness of spatial redundancy, and possibly for video encoding without going through a clueless encoder querying pixels (and having the ability to exploit hardware efficiency to decode&#x2F;render the stream).

I have been wondering what he is going to do under the recently declared partial mobilisation. I hope he could find a way to get out the country. He needs to know he is always welcomed in Turkiye.

Cool use of Webassemly! See also the 500 line <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ssloy&#x2F;tinyrenderer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ssloy&#x2F;tinyrenderer</a> or the 100 line Python&#x2F;numpy version <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rougier&#x2F;tiny-renderer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rougier&#x2F;tiny-renderer</a><p>Both cpu renderers with texture mapping and Wavefront obj import without further dependencies.

Does this use WebGL2? It doesn&#x27;t run on my phone (which does support WebGL 1).<p>Edit: According to the JS source file it appears to be a plain 2D canvas. Now I am even more confused, those should definitely load!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tsoding&#x2F;olive.c&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;js&#x2F;vc.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tsoding&#x2F;olive.c&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;js&#x2F;vc.js</a>

It&#x27;s cool that you can get away with software rendering these days, but it&#x27;s a shame to not make use of the power of the GPU.

From the build.sh I figured out that all it takes is to compile with the wasm target, I think:<p>clang $COMMON_CFLAGS -Os -fno-builtin --target=wasm32 ...

this is very impressive, how is this done? the executable is only a few hundred KB and it runs for me, wasm is doing the magic here but I don&#x27;t know too much about how the process works.<p>I added -I&#x2F;usr&#x2F;include&#x2F;SDL2 to build.sh, made sure wasm-ld is in place, and it builds and runs smoothly.

Any plans for text rendering?

Amazing that software rendering can be this smooth on a phone.

Nice! An awesome retrospective.

It pains me to see #include &lt;olive.c&gt; at the top of the file. It makes the project feel like a toy.