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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

I know it goes against the HH ethos but... you should consider using SDL2 in the future for projects like this. You'll get greater (and better tested) cross-platform compatibility, support for more peripherals, better image support, etc, and not have to write most of this on your own.

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In a sense, I did use SDL. The source code of SDL, along with GLFW and Sokol, were my primary references when writing the platform layers.

From the description of the project, I would dare a guess that the intent of this project was to go as self-contained as reasonably possible:

> […] written in standard C11 using only system libraries (with system libraries defined as anything included in the C standard library or supported operating systems).

I think you're missing the point.

I'm not missing the point, I'm just saying that in general, outside of specifically having the goal of not using any third party libraries, SDL is a good idea for a project like this.

IMHO SDL mostly makes sense on Linux because it hides a lot of really ugly window system and GLX setup code.

On Windows (with Win32+DXGI+D3D11) and macOS (with Cocoa+Metal+MetalKit), things like setting up a window, 3D device and swap chain is just a few lines of relatively straightforward code, so SDL is by far not as useful there as on Linux.

SDL does a lot more than open windows. It gives _cross-platform_ graphics, audio, and input handling.

...which is also quite trivial with OS-native code on Win32 and macOS. Besides, the whole point of the OP's project is to not use separate dependencies.

"OS-native" implies not cross-platform.

Libraries like that might make it easier to get started, but they tend to limit what you can do. For example, I recently created a Desktop GUI app that could take inputs from a networking socket. How do you do that cleanly? There is often a way around limitations, for example by creating a separate thread, or by polling every so many milliseconds (which is ugly and a waste of resources). In my case, interfacing directly with Win32 without a 3rd party layer in between, it was easy to create an Event Object for the socket and am calling MsgWaitForMultipleObjects() in my message loop. Not sure what's a good solution to do this with SDL, but why should I even bother...

SDL can handle events and message passing just fine, but you would have to write most of that yourself either way, since it isn't a framework.

How do you mean it "can handle events"? I barely know SDL, but it does not look like it is super straightforward to integrate a socket:

    https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/windows/SDL_windowsevents.c#L1430
    https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL-1.2/blob/main/src/events/SDL_events.c#L403
    https://github.com/SDL-mirror/SDL/blob/master/src/events/SDL_events.c#L769

Also, it seems to create a separate listener thread just to pump the messages, which I'm not sure I like.

I could imagine SDL supports new event types by requiring the user to create _yet_ another thread, which waits for e.g. network events, then submits them to the SDL main event queue.

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