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Comment by dwwoelfel | Hacker News Reader

If you're looking for this, but with an API, I built https://sourcecodeshots.com to power syntax highlighting and Open Graph images of code for https://essay.dev.

I initially used carbon.now.sh, but they don't have an API, and the community-provided API is pretty slow because it uses a headless browser to generate the image.

Source Code Shots uses VSCode's syntax-highlighting engine, so the highlighting is about as good as you can get and I can fully support a lot of languages that CodeMirror or Highlight.js haven't gotten to.

The docs, https://sourcecodeshots.com/docs, have plenty of examples of how to use it as an API. You can email me at daniel@onegraph.com if there's something you need that it doesn't support.

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This is pretty cool but I notice the default R fibonacci code is like comically non-idiomatic (or poorly linted, even).

Since I suspect the cause here is copy-pasting off of an algorithms/code gallery, my guess is that there are examples across other languages. I checked everything I feel idiomatically comfortable enough and the others all seemed fine, but there are a lot of options here so who knows.

If you have a good recursive version of Fibonacci for R, I'd love to swap it out for what I currently have.

For the languages I don't know, I looked at the code people posted on rosettacode.org

What's the reason for the sideways traffic light in the top bar? Is it part of the final image?

It's supposed to resemble a mac app window. I can add a setting to remove it if you like. Email me at daniel@onegraph.com and I'll let you know when it's available.

How do you create images without a headless browser?

Poe’s Law hard at work here.

There are lots of different approaches you could take. For sourcecodeshots, I run it through VSCode's tokenizer (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-textmate) and then use node-canvas to generate the image one line at a time.

It's a very imperative process and fairly slow on a cpu, but the nice thing is that I can run the same code in the browser to speed up development. The Rust project, https://github.com/Aloxaf/silicon, mentioned in another part of the comments is probably faster, but I didn't find it when I was searching for a solution.

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