sky_renderer

sky_renderer is a minimalist 2D graphics engine written in Rust with native OpenGL bindings. Its goal is to provide a robust foundation for rendering 2D shapes and visualizing 2-dimensional data in real time.

The current (0.4.0) release offers low-level OpenGL bindings and basic rendering capabilities. It is not yet production-ready. Future releases will expand the feature set with additional drawing primitives.

✨ Features

Currently supported drawing primitives:

• Points
• Lines (with antialiasing and thickness)
• Polylines
• Arcs
• Rectangles
• Triangles
• Circles
• Polygons
• Images

Other features:

• Bundled GLFW 3.4 (no external dependency required)
• Basic animation support
• Basic zoom in/out support
• Experimental svg output support

🚧 Status

⚠️ APIs are still evolving -- always use the latest release.

📦 Examples code

You can find usage examples in the examples directory of the sky_renderer repository. These will be updated as new futures are introduced.

Basic API usage is illustrated below:

extern crate sky_renderer;

use sky_renderer::core::{App, Color, Renderable, Renderer, Window};
use sky_renderer::graphics2d::shapes::Rectangle;
use sky_renderer::graphics2d::shapes::ShapeRenderable;

fn main() {
    let window = Window::new("Shapes", 800, 800);
    let mut app = App::new(window);

    let mut shapes = vec![
        ShapeRenderable::line(
            100.0,
            200.0,
            300.0,
            250.0,
            Color::from_rgb(0.0, 1.0, 0.0),
            1.0,
        ),
        ShapeRenderable::polyline(
            &[
                (100.0, 300.0),
                (150.0, 430.0),
                (200.0, 410.0),
                (200.0, 500.0),
            ],
            Color::from_rgb(1.0, 0.0, 0.0),
            10.0,
        )
    ];

    let renderer = Renderer::new();
    renderer.set_point_size(6.0);

    app.on_render(move || {
        for shape in &mut shapes {
            shape.render(&renderer);
        }
    });
    app.run();
}

For a full example, see:

• shapes.rs

Additional examples:

• shapes_with_zoom.rs – illustrates zoom in/out functionality
• bouncing_balls – illustrates simple animation (run with cargo run inside the examples/bouncing_balls folder)

📖 Docs

tbd.

Wiki

Refer to the sky_renderer GitHub wiki, which will be updated soon.

🐞 Issues

You can raise issues directly on Github.

🔧 Installation

Linux

Make sure you have the necessary build tools installed (including a C/C++ compiler and CMake):

sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dev
sudo apt install mesa-utils
# libglfw3-dev is no longer required as of 0.4.0 (GLFW 3.4 is bundled)
# sudo apt install libglfw3-dev
sudo apt install libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev xorg-dev

You can add sky_renderer as a dependency in your project. During the build process, Cargo will invoke CMake (using your system’s C/C++ compiler) to compile a static library containing the sky_renderer FFI bindings to OpenGL

The FFI bindings are available in the project's cpp/ directory

Windows

Ensure you have Visual C++ Build Tools and CMake installed.

For v0.4.0 and later

No external GLFW installation is required — GLFW 3.4 is bundled and statically compiled with sky_renderer. You only need a C/C++ compiler and CMake available in your environment.

For versions prior to 0.4.0

• Use release 0.1.7 or later (earlier versions did not support Windows)
• Install GLFW using vcpkg:

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.git
cd vcpkg
.\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
.\vcpkg install glfw3

Update your system's environment variables:

• Define the VCPKG_LIB_PATH environment variable to point to vcpkg's lib folder (where glfw3.lib is installed, e.g D:\PATH_TO\vcpkg\installed\x64-windows\lib)
• Add vcpkg's bin folder (where glfw3.dll is installed, e.g. D:\PATH_TO\vcpkg\installed\x64-windows\bin) to your system PATH.

macOS

You need a C/C++ compiler and CMake available in your environment.

For v0.4.0 and later No external GLFW installation is required — GLFW 3.4 is bundled and statically compiled with sky_renderer.

For versions prior to 0.4.0

• Install GLFW using Homebrew:

brew install glfw
brew info glfw

Once glfw is installed, the crate's build script will look for the glfw libraries under /opt/homebrew/lib