Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything from user interfaces for specialized embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments. At its heart lies a robust and portable multimedia engine, with a well-tested and well-documented Lua scripting interface. The development emphasizes security, debuggability and performance, guided by a principle of least surprise in terms of API design. For the main engine there has been quite some refactoring to reduce input latency; better accommodate variable-refresh rate display; prepare for asymmetric uncooperative multi-GPU and GPU handover; explicit synchronization and runtime transitions back and forth between low (16-bit) to standard (32-bit) to high-definition rendering (10-bit + fp16/fp32).
Features
- All runtime configuration is consolidated into a database
- Robust and portable multimedia engine
- Well-tested and well-documented Lua scripting interface
- The development emphasizes security, debuggability and performance
- Some distributions, e.g. voidlinux have most of arcan as part of its packages
- There are many ways to tune the build steps in order to reduce dependencies