Raylib

raylib development started in August 2013 by Ramon Santamaria to support a game development course, focused on students with no previous coding experience and artistic profile; the library acted as a direct replacement of WinBGI. During the course, raylib was further developed based on the feedback of the students and by June 2014, the library was starting to be showcased in several game development events in Barcelona.

raylib 1.0 was released in November 2013 and it featured around 80 functions for window and inputs management, basic shapes drawing, textures loading and drawing, fonts loading, text drawing, basic 3d shapes drawing, audio system management and audio files loading and playing. First raylib version went through 8 subversion iterations (from raylib 1.1 to raylib 1.8), growing version after version with the addition of new modules, new platforms and new features along 5 years. Some of the most notable improvements were Android, WebAssembly and Raspberry Pi support, multiple OpenGL backends, VR support and tens examples to explore and learn.

raylib 2.0 was released in July 2018 and for the first time the library removed all external dependencies, all required libraries are included and compiled along raylib. This version also exposed a number of configuration options for the library features to minimize size and it greatly improved build system, supporting various continuous integration systems. Along the following two years multiple parts of the library were reviewed and improved and well as all the library ecosystem. One raylib 2.5 iteration was released in the middle of this process.

raylib 3.0 was released in April 2020 featuring several big internal redesigns to improve library portability and bindings generation. Some of the key changes of raylib 3.0 were moving global variables to a global state contexts, support custom memory allocators, a centralized file system for memory data loading and a collection of +115 code examples to explore and learn.

raylib 3.5 was released in December 2020 including several improvements and additions.

raylib has kept growing and improving along several years with the addition of multiple features but always keeping its core value: being a simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy programming.[6][7][8]

raylib comes with the following features:[9][10]

• Support for many platforms, including Windows, Linux, macOS, Raspberry Pi Android and HTML5
• Support for OpenGL 1.1, 2.1, 3.3 and OpenGL ES 2.0 as backend
• Image, textures and fonts loading and drawing from several formats
• Audio loading and playing from several formats and streaming support
• Math operations for vectors, matrices, and quaternions
• 2D rendering with a camera, including automatic sprites batching
• 3D models rendering including custom shaders and postprocessing shaders
• Support for VR, including configurable HMD device parameters
• Support for animated as well as non-animated 3D and 2D models
• Big examples collection with +115 code examples

raylib was primary intended for education on video games and graphics programming but due to its simplicity and ease of use, it has been also adopted by many hobbyist game developers.

There are active and growing communities in multiple networks like reddit and Discord.[11]

GitHub lists over 120 projects on raylib topic.[12][13]

In April 2019, raylib developer was awarded with the Google Open Source Peer Bonus award for contributing to the open-source ecosystem with raylib.[21]

In August 2020, raylib was awarded with an Epic MegaGrant by Epic Games to support raylib development. [22]

The following program in the C programming language uses raylib to create a white window with some centered text.

#include "raylib.h"
int main(void)
{
    const int screenWidth = 800;
    const int screenHeight = 450;
    InitWindow(screenWidth, screenHeight, "raylib [core] example - basic window");
    SetTargetFPS(60);

    while (!WindowShouldClose())
    {
        BeginDrawing();
            ClearBackground(RAYWHITE);
            DrawText("Congrats! You created your first window!", 190, 200, 20, LIGHTGRAY);
        EndDrawing();
    }

    CloseWindow();
    return 0;
}

• Official website
• raylib on GitHub
• raylib games