Ask HN: Any minimalist cross-platform low-level C graphic library?

1 point

6 years ago

I often find myself needing a canvas to experiment things. In the Javascript world it's pretty easy: open a tab, open the dev console, append a <canvas> to your DOM and that's it.

What could be the equivalent in C ?

My requirements are: 1. Can create a window and push pixel to it. 2. No dependencies, especially not OpenGL. 3. Some drawing capabilities (lines, shapes, 2d transformation). 4. Can wait for user inputs (in a blocking way ideally). 5. Appreciated: Single header. 6. Optional: Some text drawing capability.

Note that I am not looking for a GUI/widget library like Nuklear. I just need to push pixels into a window. The obvious closest would be SDL (or something like raylib) but it depends on OpenGL and offer way more than I need (3d capabilities, sound, etc).

Although minimalist, I still want that library to handle the underlying window system (X11 on linux, Windows shell, Quartz) so I don't worry about portability.

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