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Well your sorta comparing heavyweight OS graphics stack APIs with old school firmware ones. Even so, things like SDL2 are dead simple, one requests a window reg

Well your sorta comparing heavyweight OS graphics stack APIs with old school firmware ones. Even so, things like SDL2 are dead simple, one requests a window region and its possible to write bytes to the resulting buffer that show up in a window. That said modern firmware interfaces are still pretty clean. If you write a UEFI hello world, its possible to access the raw frame buffer with just a connection to the GOP, which is just a couple lines of code in C. Its conceptually pretty close to what your describing, except its designed to work with a slightly more modern programming paradigm. https://wiki.osdev.org/GOP https://wiki.osdev.org/GOP

enriquto 5y ago
I wouldn't call SDL2 "dead simple", unless sarcastically. Just opening an empty SDL window requires writing about 20 lines of code that deal with several different abstractions, a "window", a "surface", a "renderer, an "event". I only want an array of pixels that I can edit and see the results in realtime. It is of course possible to do that, but it seems ridiculously overcomplicated. I was taught as a kid to program simple graphical demos using peek and poke in basic. Then in assembler. In either case, stupid me got colored pixels on the screen after a few minutes of work. Kids these days, how do they start? Please, don't tell me "matplotlib" or I will cry myself to sleep.
- StillBored 5y ago
  It depends a bit on your language bindings, if you look at say a python example: https://about-prog.com/en/articles/python/hello_world_sdl2 https://about-prog.com/en/articles/python/hello_world_sdl2 Its basically, grab a window, show it, grab a render/draw buffer update it and make it visible. I don't really find the base C version much more complex, although it does have a bit of boilerplate around init/window creation/grab surface/display surface/etc. I'm not sure I would consider that particularly complex. Sure SDL can get complex when you start trying to use GL/etc but if all you want is a buffer to write bytes that become pixels its pretty straightforward IMHO. I would say its roughly the same level of complexity (if not less) than HTML canvas+JS.

enriquto 5y ago

I wouldn't call SDL2 "dead simple", unless sarcastically. Just opening an empty SDL window requires writing about 20 lines of code that deal with several different abstractions, a "window", a "surface", a "renderer, an "event". I only want an array of pixels that I can edit and see the results in realtime. It is of course possible to do that, but it seems ridiculously overcomplicated. I was taught as a kid to program simple graphical demos using peek and poke in basic. Then in assembler. In either case, stupid me got colored pixels on the screen after a few minutes of work. Kids these days, how do they start? Please, don't tell me "matplotlib" or I will cry myself to sleep.

StillBored 5y ago
It depends a bit on your language bindings, if you look at say a python example: https://about-prog.com/en/articles/python/hello_world_sdl2 https://about-prog.com/en/articles/python/hello_world_sdl2 Its basically, grab a window, show it, grab a render/draw buffer update it and make it visible. I don't really find the base C version much more complex, although it does have a bit of boilerplate around init/window creation/grab surface/display surface/etc. I'm not sure I would consider that particularly complex. Sure SDL can get complex when you start trying to use GL/etc but if all you want is a buffer to write bytes that become pixels its pretty straightforward IMHO. I would say its roughly the same level of complexity (if not less) than HTML canvas+JS.