Ah, I thought you were referring to setjmp with this: > Some other image libraries are hard because they force you to write many code-paths to handle various d

Ah, I thought you were referring to setjmp with this: > Some other image libraries are hard because they force you to write many code-paths to handle various different cases, but libpng provides many different helpers that make it pretty simple. It seemed that you were thinking of error code handling as a "code-path" and setjmp/longjmp being a mechanism to reduce code paths. Anyway, it sounds like we're in agreement. It's not that big of a deal to use libpng directly, and "worst API ever" is too strong. The author has probably not done enough Windows API programming to find the worst API ever :-).