Ripl
A unified 2D/3D engine for Canvas, SVG, WebGPU, and the Terminal
Details
- External ID
- 47437613
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Ripl
- Website domain
- ripl.rocks
- Launched
- March 19, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 17
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7103321033210332
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
After several years, with a small hiatus in the middle, I've finally got Ripl to the point of being published. Ripl is a library for rendering 2D and 3D shapes to any context (canvas, SVG, WebGPU, and Terminal supported by default) using a single API. The library mimics the DOM as much as possible, replicating the event system, object graphing, CSS-like querying, gradients, and keyframe animations etc.I also built a complete data visualization library using the core package which is available as @ripl/charts. And yes, you can even render the charts to a terminal with about a 2-3 line code change :) (see the terminal demo)Docs are available here: https://www.ripl.rocks Demos are available here: https://www.ripl.rocks/demos Charts are avialable here: https://www.ripl.rocks/docs/chartsI've also built an interactive playground you can use to play around with it in realtime without having to install it from NPM etc. The playground is available here: https://www.ripl.rocks/playgroundThe core library is quite stable and I'll likely publish v1 in the coming weeks. The charts, 3D, and Terminal packages are still very experiemental.I'd interested to hear what you all think of it.
Enrichment
- Theme
- creative coding and visual experiments
- Vertical
- —
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- unified 2d/3d graphics engine
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Creating a zero-dependency unified 2D/3D rendering engine supporting Canvas, SVG, WebGPU, and terminal Braille/ANSI with custom geometry and shaders requires profound computer graphics expertise.
What it would actually take: Building this engine requires an expert in computer graphics and vector math to design an abstracted scene graph, custom 2D path rasterization, bezier curve algorithms, and WebGPU 3D pipelines (WGSL shaders, lighting, camera transforms, raycasting). Additionally, it demands custom software rasterizers to convert vector geometry into Braille Unicode patterns and ANSI escape codes for terminal rendering, alongside a complete interactive charting suite with zero external dependencies.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 199 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #82 of 200 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 136 days after the earliest competitor.
- PyMOL-RS · hn · 2026-02-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- I built a declarative layout engine for SVG, Canvas, WebGL · hn · 2026-07-03 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- a Rust ray tracer that runs on any GPU · hn · 2025-11-03 · 95 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Zephyr3D · hn · 2025-11-26 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Minimalist library to generate SVG views of scientific data · hn · 2026-03-23 · 47 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- node-webgl · github · 2026-09-16 · 39 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- A browser-based vector animation engine rendering animated objects · hn · 2026-07-27 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Mesh3d.gallery · hn · 2026-04-02 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.