It's not a hack in that it's held together by tape, precarious, or any such thing; it's a hack because it's going around the back of SDL to do the graphics, eve

It's not a hack in that it's held together by tape, precarious, or any such thing; it's a hack because it's going around the back of SDL to do the graphics, even though SDL is supposed to do all the graphics for you. Perhaps my wording was poor. It's more of a hack than in SDL2, where all the SDL functions support hardware rendering with no need to touch OpenGL directly ever. The general point still stands that you can write performant software rendering in SDL1.