Improve the README #325
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madsmtm
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Jan 27, 2026
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| ## How it works | ||
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| ## License & Credits | ||
| Most platforms have a compositor of some sort (WindowServer on macOS, Desktop Window Manager on | ||
| Windows, the Wayland compositor, etc). This is a separate process that applications communicate | ||
| with over IPC, and it is responsible for taking the various surfaces that applications send to it | ||
| and mash ("composite") them together in the right way to render the user's desktop on the | ||
| connected monitors. | ||
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| This library is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, just like minifb and rust. Significant portions of code were taken | ||
| from the minifb library to do platform-specific work. | ||
| The role of Softbuffer then is to create a shared memory region (i.e. [`Buffer`]) that can be | ||
| written to from the CPU, and then handed to the compositor (in [`Buffer::present`]). Softbuffer | ||
| keeps a set of buffers around per surface to implement double-buffering (depending on platform | ||
| requirements). | ||
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| Softbuffer strives to present buffers in a zero-copy manner. One interesting wrinkle here is that | ||
| the compositor is often GPU-accelerated, so on platforms without a unified memory architecture, | ||
| some copying is inherently necessary (though when possible, it is done in hardware using DMA). |
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I'm fairly confident in most this section, or at least confident that this is a good mental model for how Softbuffer should work internally, but would ideally like some more eyes on it.
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This seems like a fairly good description to me.
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notgull
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This one has been a long time coming.
It's more relevant to list actual features etc. at the top, than to list alternatives.
Provide motivation and recommend `tiny-skia` and `vello_cpu` for drawing primitives.
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Thanks for the reviews! |
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Move the list of alternatives and license lower, and instead write some high-level information on how to use Softbuffer and how it works (or at least how it should work once we're zero-copy on all platforms).