This Developer Voices podcast interview digs into the juicy details of building a graphics engine in Rust through the lens of a purpose-built programming language made for graphics pipelines. This language, Graphene, is built on top of the Rust language and supports both JIT and ahead-of-time-`rustc`compilation of reusable image editing pipelines down to standalone programs (like full screen apps or CLIs akin to ImageMagick) and embedding in other apps like games or websites. And built on top of that language/engine, we talk about how our open source Graphite ( https://graphite.rs/ ) editor is being built to offer a credible alternative to creative apps like Photoshop and Inkscape.
In short, we're building an approachable, artist-friendly graphics editor that allows technical users to dig into its underlying technical details. Instead of picking one focus—like vector, raster, painting, photo processing, or animation—we're generalizing the technology and building something that's more like a "game engine" for universal graphics processing, where artist-friendly editing tools act like the "coding environment" or "IDE" for the underlying graphics programming language. Artists use industry-standard workflows to draw their artwork, and Graphite automatically sets up the Graphene node graph "code" behind the scenes for rendering their creations.
If your interest is piqued in languages/compilers, graphics programming, or rendering techniques and you're looking for a summer internship, applications are open for GSoC 2025 ( https://graphite.rs/volunteer/guide/student-projects/ ) working with us to build a better Graphene and Graphite, especially focused on the infrastructure for GPU-accelerated raster rendering. Get in touch (Discord is best) to tell us your background if that's of interest. We'll especially be prioritizing applicants with a languages/compilers and low-level GPU (WGPU, Vulkan, OpenGL, etc.) programming background. Even if you're not looking for an internship, but you can lend a hand with a compilers/graphics/game engines background, this is the area we are most bottlenecked on so your open source contributions would go tremendously far in helping us achieve our mission to recreate Blender's success, but in the 2D creative software domain.
In short, we're building an approachable, artist-friendly graphics editor that allows technical users to dig into its underlying technical details. Instead of picking one focus—like vector, raster, painting, photo processing, or animation—we're generalizing the technology and building something that's more like a "game engine" for universal graphics processing, where artist-friendly editing tools act like the "coding environment" or "IDE" for the underlying graphics programming language. Artists use industry-standard workflows to draw their artwork, and Graphite automatically sets up the Graphene node graph "code" behind the scenes for rendering their creations.
If your interest is piqued in languages/compilers, graphics programming, or rendering techniques and you're looking for a summer internship, applications are open for GSoC 2025 ( https://graphite.rs/volunteer/guide/student-projects/ ) working with us to build a better Graphene and Graphite, especially focused on the infrastructure for GPU-accelerated raster rendering. Get in touch (Discord is best) to tell us your background if that's of interest. We'll especially be prioritizing applicants with a languages/compilers and low-level GPU (WGPU, Vulkan, OpenGL, etc.) programming background. Even if you're not looking for an internship, but you can lend a hand with a compilers/graphics/game engines background, this is the area we are most bottlenecked on so your open source contributions would go tremendously far in helping us achieve our mission to recreate Blender's success, but in the 2D creative software domain.