What kind of drawing? Art or technical?

Since you posted in /c/rust@programming.dev, I'll give an answer for Rust.

When thinking about rendering, there are mostly 2 ways to complete it

1. You handle setting pixels (usually rgba) at x and y coordinates
2. You use a graphics toolkit that handles rendering commonly used drawing methods. Like rendering circles of a specific size, rendering a line between 2 points, etc.

For 1, the crate pixels provides rendering to x and y coordinates with the CPU to window. If you're doing lots of operations, you'll probably find this too slow, and not fast enough. To solve this problem, people use a GPU instead with shaders. vulkano-rs is a good, wgpu is also good.

For 2, I don't have immediate recommendations, but you can usually find these types of toolkits with game engines. As an example, bevy has an example of rendering shapes.

It also just depends where you want to render. If you're limited to in the browser, you'll find that maybe vulcano won't work, and you'll have to use something like WebGPU instead. Or maybe you're restricted to an environment where a web browser can't be used, so WebGPU can't be used, and Vulkano has to be how you complete it. Maybe you can't use a GPU, and need to render directly to a canvas on web page in the browser, then you can just use the MSDN docs for the canvas. etc.

If you're unfamiliar with PostScript or basic linear algebra, I would start by reading a book or tutorial on PostScript. Not to know how to produce PostScript output, but rather to understand how it handles coordinate transformations. So your drawing program can have nested objects with a transformation for each object, and the transformations compose through the nesting levels. Then you can rotate and scale complicated figures by just changing a single transformation, which is a 2x3 matrix. It's really 3x3 but in "homogenous coordinates" so you only have to store 6 of the numbers.

Obviously, also play with other drawing programs to get ideas for what you want yours to do.

There are also tons of books on computer graphics, though maybe not specifically about drawing programs. The ones I've looked at are way old by now though.

It is a very broad topic, you didn't specify what kind of a drawing program you'd want to make. If it's a simple raster drawing, like mspaint used to be, it is not that complicated to make. But complexity quickly adds up - filters, transforms, brushes, layers - it grows in complexity quickly. The easiest GUI in rust I found so far is egui. It provides an immediate mode for drawing graphics that is really simple to grasp very quickly. If it is the best in the long run is questionable, but to get your feet wet - I'd say is perfect

You'll want to decide on a GUI framework to start as you'll have to design quite a bit around it. Rnote is a good place to look, it uses GTK+libadwaita.