I'm building a personal 2D animation application and want to choose the language and framework before the project gets too far along. The long-term plan includes a drawing canvas, layers, a timeline, brushes, vector and bitmap tools, and general animation features. It will initially target Windows, but I may support other platforms later.
For anyone who has worked on graphics software, drawing tools, animation programs, or similar applications, what language and framework would you recommend? I'm especially interested in rendering performance, canvas and drawing APIs, GPU acceleration, handling large projects, and keeping the codebase maintainable as the application grows. I'm looking for technical guidance rather than someone to build the software for me.
4 Answers
For a cross-platform desktop application, .NET with Avalonia is worth investigating. It can provide a modern UI across Windows and other platforms, while the rendering backend can use hardware acceleration. You would still need to implement or integrate the canvas, brush engine, timeline, and document model, but the framework could reduce the amount of platform-specific UI code. A game engine such as Godot or Unity is another possibility if you want ready-made real-time 2D rendering, although it may not fit as naturally for a traditional art-editor interface.
Python with Manim can be excellent for generating programmed mathematical or scientific animations, but it probably is not the best foundation for a full drawing editor with interactive brushes, layers, a timeline, and large bitmap projects. It is better suited to scripted animation than to a general-purpose paint-and-animation application.
C++ is a common choice for this kind of software because it gives you direct access to graphics APIs, memory, threading, and performance optimizations. It also has a large ecosystem of libraries for windows, UI, rendering, image formats, and animation. The tradeoff is that it takes more care to keep the code safe and maintainable. C# could be a more approachable starting point, but C++ may give you more flexibility if performance and low-level control become important.
C# is a perfectly reasonable option, especially if you want to get a working editor built without taking on all the complexity of C++. I previously made a graphics-heavy document tool in C#, and it handled the application side well. The main thing is to design the rendering and data model carefully rather than choosing a language based only on theoretical speed. You can always isolate performance-critical parts later if profiling shows a real bottleneck.
Godot is an interesting suggestion. I had mostly been thinking about desktop UI frameworks, but I may compare it with Avalonia for the canvas and interaction side.