Raylib and C

11 May 2021

Recently I wanted to refresh my C programming skills and was on the lookout for a library or framework for getting graphics onto the screen while doing so and I stumbled upon the Raylib library. It suited the bill perfectly.

Previously I had a quick play with the X windows libraries directly in C but I fancied something slightly higher level but also something different to what I have used before SDL and SFML, so I did some searching and found Raylib which is a fantastic little library designed around writing simple video games in C and C++.

The library is specifically written in C which is great as I wanted to avoid all the extra C++ features that I haven’t touched in many years, and also wanted to not be beholden to an object orientated style since I have been spending a lot of my time programming in Scala and Kotlin in recent years.

Raylib provides everything you need without any additional libraries which is very nice. It has an easy to use API for building simple applications, a tonne of examples, and even a cheat sheet so you don’t have to spend your time hunting for functions.

With all this I set out and made 2 quick applications in C using Raylib:

The first was a simple Conway’s Game of Life Implementation:

The second was a Galaxy Generator:

I have created both before in other languages and frameworks and find that the Game of Life is an excellent toy program to test a framework with. The galaxy generator matches about the same amount of code in a higher level language like Kotlin which impressed me!

Overall if you do some C programming or want to have a play with a framework for building games or just graphical applications in C I’d say give Raylib a look into!