love VS raylib

Compare love vs raylib and see what are their differences.

Our great sponsors
  • Sonar - Write Clean C++ Code. Always.
  • InfluxDB - Access the most powerful time series database as a service
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
love raylib
231 336
3,106 12,357
4.0% -
3.5 9.5
8 days ago 4 days ago
C++ C
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later zlib 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.

love

Posts with mentions or reviews of love. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-22.
  • Anybody working on games here?
    13 projects | reddit.com/r/Clojure | 22 Mar 2023
    Tho personally I've come to prefer making my games in https://love2d.org and https://tic80.com
  • I chose lua to begin my coding journey. Did I do the right thing?
    2 projects | reddit.com/r/lua | 21 Mar 2023
    Start by making some games imo, unless you already have a good project in mind. https://tic80.com or https://love2d.org
  • 7yo wants to get started in game development
    3 projects | reddit.com/r/gamedev | 6 Mar 2023
    If all goes well with PICO-8, you can "upgrade" to love2d, which like PICO-8 uses Lua programming language, but allows for higher resolutions, and generally more polished outcome.
  • Senior software engineer - what game engine should I start with ?
    5 projects | reddit.com/r/gamedev | 6 Mar 2023
    I have a similar profile, and I have tried many different engines/frameworks/libraries. Some thoughts: - ebiten, written in Go, is a very light game dev lib. I like Go, so writing "my own engine" with it was pretty fun (I have some libs for ebiten here). Mostly 2d. - Love2d is sort of the same thing, but written in C++, and scriptable in Lua. I absolutely love this level of abstraction, and this is probably the one I have been the most productive with (example here). Mostly 2d, but people have done 3d with it too. - Godot has a bright future, at least from my point of view. The 2D workflow is very very fast, much faster than Unity in my experience (you don't spend time waiting for stuff to recompile every time you edit a script, for starters), and they just released v4, which comes with insane improvements in 3D rendering. I have never delved into 3D, but from what I can see, it's on par with what Unity can produce these days. Plus, the founders have created a separate commercial entity to provide support for consoles (called W4games), because the open source licensing attached to Godot is not compatible with the NDAs involved in publishing for consoles - raylib and monogame might be interesting for you if you want to go old-school. They're both inspired by the same framework (XNA) and they work similarly. Also very close to the way Love2d does things, and a comparable level of abstraction. - Unity is slow. I honestly dislike it a lot, just for this reason. There's also a lot of "we've refactored this, and there's no docs yet, but you can also use this other system, and also the legacy one, and that one, or build your own based on these primitives" and it's hard when you're a beginner. If you know what you're doing I guess it's fine, or if you don't care, but as a software engineer, you will probably be like me and try to find the "best" solution to your problem, which is tiring and hard to do with Unity.
  • My 9yo kid wants to learn how to code to make games, but I have no idea where to start
    6 projects | reddit.com/r/learnprogramming | 5 Mar 2023
  • What language should I teach my little sister
    7 projects | reddit.com/r/learnprogramming | 23 Feb 2023
    Also, a recommendation that is a little more Niche. Lua, and love. love2d.org is a really easy to make games with a relatively simple programming language. Could be fun.
  • Folks, the platform is not just for query resolution
    2 projects | reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor | 20 Feb 2023
    Are you saying she wants the D? Because that's a total brainfuck. I'd much rather believe they merely fell in Löve.
  • My 11 y/o son is seriously interested in learning to code
    7 projects | reddit.com/r/learnprogramming | 17 Feb 2023
  • Can I make a game with a low IQ ?
    3 projects | reddit.com/r/gamedev | 14 Feb 2023
    Being a hard worker and having persistence are more important than being intelligent; a lazy genius never accomplishes anything. Try learning programming as its own skill separate from gamedev first. If you're finding C# too difficult, than try a simpler language like Lua. Lua specifically can be used with Love2D to make games.
  • HELP
    2 projects | reddit.com/r/programming | 10 Feb 2023
    i read you want to make games. go for 2d games, love https://love2d.org/ or pygame https://www.pygame.org/news or some kind of js engine for webgame https://github.com/collections/javascript-game-engines

raylib

Posts with mentions or reviews of raylib. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-25.
  • Looking for a C++ 2D/3D rendering engine/api.
    4 projects | reddit.com/r/gamedev | 25 Mar 2023
    Sounds like Raylib! https://www.raylib.com/
  • Simplest graphics programming language/framework
    4 projects | reddit.com/r/GraphicsProgramming | 22 Mar 2023
    https://www.raylib.com/ is super simple and has been ported to work with a lot of languages
  • Module & Packages
    3 projects | reddit.com/r/Zig | 17 Mar 2023
    Say you want to make a game, and want to use the raylib library. I do this in my build.zig(not sure if it's correct, but works for me).
  • Functional Geometry with Gambit Scheme and Raylib
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Mar 2023
    You probably know this already, but something cool the Raylib project does is offer a description of their API in JSON/XML, meaning that data-driven binding generation can be done.

    https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/blob/master/parser/output/...

  • Does C++ give you superpowers?
    3 projects | reddit.com/r/learnprogramming | 13 Mar 2023
    Make a simple video game while using the Raylib library and read this book. If you don't know much about object oriented design then you might need to start with some Python or something until you get how classes and methods and inheritance works
  • Senior software engineer - what game engine should I start with ?
    5 projects | reddit.com/r/gamedev | 6 Mar 2023
    I have a similar profile, and I have tried many different engines/frameworks/libraries. Some thoughts: - ebiten, written in Go, is a very light game dev lib. I like Go, so writing "my own engine" with it was pretty fun (I have some libs for ebiten here). Mostly 2d. - Love2d is sort of the same thing, but written in C++, and scriptable in Lua. I absolutely love this level of abstraction, and this is probably the one I have been the most productive with (example here). Mostly 2d, but people have done 3d with it too. - Godot has a bright future, at least from my point of view. The 2D workflow is very very fast, much faster than Unity in my experience (you don't spend time waiting for stuff to recompile every time you edit a script, for starters), and they just released v4, which comes with insane improvements in 3D rendering. I have never delved into 3D, but from what I can see, it's on par with what Unity can produce these days. Plus, the founders have created a separate commercial entity to provide support for consoles (called W4games), because the open source licensing attached to Godot is not compatible with the NDAs involved in publishing for consoles - raylib and monogame might be interesting for you if you want to go old-school. They're both inspired by the same framework (XNA) and they work similarly. Also very close to the way Love2d does things, and a comparable level of abstraction. - Unity is slow. I honestly dislike it a lot, just for this reason. There's also a lot of "we've refactored this, and there's no docs yet, but you can also use this other system, and also the legacy one, and that one, or build your own based on these primitives" and it's hard when you're a beginner. If you know what you're doing I guess it's fine, or if you don't care, but as a software engineer, you will probably be like me and try to find the "best" solution to your problem, which is tiring and hard to do with Unity.
  • Yet another 'How do I get my raylib project to compile?' thread
    5 projects | reddit.com/r/raylib | 13 Feb 2023
    'Copy the VSCode folder (and all its contents) from raylib/projects/VSCode (from your installed directory) to your desired project location. These files can also be found here.'
    5 projects | reddit.com/r/raylib | 13 Feb 2023
    Release raylib v4.2.0 · raysan5/raylib (github.com)
    5 projects | reddit.com/r/raylib | 13 Feb 2023
  • Ask HN: I just want to have fun programming again
    27 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Feb 2023
    I just discovered and it seems enticing: https://github.com/raysan5/raylib

    > no fancy interface, no visual helpers, no gui tools or editors... just coding in pure spartan-programmers way. Are you ready to enjoy coding?

What are some alternatives?

When comparing love and raylib you can also consider the following projects:

SFML - Simple and Fast Multimedia Library

SDL2 - SDL2 bindings to perl

imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies

bgfx - Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library.

bevy - A refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust

LearnOpenGL - Code repository of all OpenGL chapters from the book and its accompanying website https://learnopengl.com

vulkan-guide - Introductory guide to vulkan.

Godot - Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine

Raylib-cs - C# bindings for raylib, a simple and easy-to-use library to learn videogames programming

olcPixelGameEngine - The official distribution of olcPixelGameEngine, a tool used in javidx9's YouTube videos and projects

Box2D - Box2D is a 2D physics engine for games