go-sdl2 vs fenster

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go-sdl2		fenster
	Project
3	Mentions	3
2,126	Stars	511
1.4%	Growth	-
6.9	Activity	3.2
7 days ago	Latest Commit	4 months ago
C	Language	C++
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License	License	MIT License

The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

go-sdl2

Posts with mentions or reviews of go-sdl2. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-02-05.

C Port of Ken Thompson's Space Travel
5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Feb 2023
"Dr. Kobushi’s Labyrinthine Laboratory" powered by Ebitengine has been released on Steam
2 projects | /r/golang | 15 Sep 2022

An even simpler option (not a full engine) is using SDL2 bindings.
3D graphics library
10 projects | /r/golang | 28 Aug 2022

Fair enough! There are Go bindings for sdl here, and bindings for RayLib here. Beyond that, everything go game-related that I know of is a game engine.

fenster

Posts with mentions or reviews of fenster. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-02-23.

Graphic Library for C
3 projects | /r/C_Programming | 23 Feb 2023

Check out [this library](https://github.com/zserge/fenster). It's a tiny header only C lib for Windows, Mac and Linux and gives you a canvas, events, mouse and keyboard. Screen output is just a buffer. Only a couple of API calls but good enough to play Doom.
C Port of Ken Thompson's Space Travel
5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Feb 2023

There's also https://github.com/zserge/fenster which is fairly minimal and comes with Go bindings out of the box.
Fenster: Minimal highly opinionated lib to display a cross-platform 2D canvas
1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing go-sdl2 and fenster you can also consider the following projects:

raylib-go - Go bindings for raylib, a simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming.

st - C port of Ken Thompson's Space Travel

Ebiten - Ebitengine - A dead simple 2D game engine for Go

canvas - Draw on an HTML 2D canvas in a web browser from a server program using WebSockets.

Pixel - A hand-crafted 2D game library in Go

Skia - Skia is a complete 2D graphic library for drawing Text, Geometries, and Images.

Pygame - 🐍🎮 pygame (the library) is a Free and Open Source python programming language library for making multimedia applications like games built on top of the excellent SDL library. C, Python, Native, OpenGL.

st - Go port of Ken Thompson's Space Travel

d3d9 - Direct3D9 wrapper for Go.

raygui - A simple and easy-to-use immediate-mode gui library

go-collada - Go package for working with the Collada file format.

g3n - Go 3D Game Engine (http://g3n.rocks)