RAYLIB IS LOVE

I'm too good at bitching. Verily, I elevate it to an art form, grotesque though it may be.

I'm making an effort to not be 110% negative with my posts, because that doesn't really project an accurate portrayal of how I see the universe. If anything, every post should be the linguistic equivalent of an acid trip. Regardless, today we (positively) rant about Raylib: the second coming of Allegro. Or, you know, the alternate timeline where the library doesn't completely shit itself.

Many years ago, after abandoning the smoldering wreckage of Allegro 5, I traipsed over to SDL 2, which was.... uh.... hmm. Can I start bitching again?

Anyway, after wandering through the utterly dogmatic fields of SDL 2, I had decided that I found the library stilted, and difficult to work with on even my best days. The code never truly flowed when I worked with it; it were as though it were working against me at each junction. It was still better than A5, but that's setting the bar fairly low, like saying modern pop music is better than listening to choleraic people vomiting from their squeaky-clean anuses (my regards to a certain professor, who opined in class of his time in the Peace Corps).

I have to thank Madgarden for bringing up the subject; everyone kinda piled on and noted that it looked like a nice piece of kit. So, I was inbetween obsessions, or something to that effect, and decided to give it a try (on a whim, as usual). Something borderline magical happened -- I just wrote code, and shit popped up on screen. I didn't have to think about it, and amazingly, at each point where I thought "I need X, I wonder if Raylib has something for it," it just did. And I cannot stress how gobsmacked I was at the thought that someone had sat down and compiled a short, eloquent list of everything one would need to crank out a game over a weekend (or more, really, Raylib is perfectly suited to larger projects), and tossed it into a library.

It was all there, and no need to install a half dozen expansion libraries to get the experience borderline tolerable (Look ye in my direction, SDL 2, for I profane thee this night).

Anyway, at the end of the two evenings I had progressed further than I had with SDL in an entire month. The experience was on-rails, but in a good way. And there was always the option of diving into the library and calling the inner routines directly, or using the RLGL interface to summon OpenGL demons straight from the bowels of ARBhell.

You should give it a try. Who knows, you might just have fun again...