[blt]

Your response seems to assume that "XY-probing" responses are equally good as straightforward responses, but they aren't. If your question is solid, it's really annoying when others try to XY-probe it instead of answering it.

Therefore, before giving an XY-probe response to a question, one should think about the probability that the question hides an XY problem.

If the question is about drawing a square, there's no good reason to assume it's an XY problem. Better to just answer the question.

If the question is about something strange that should never come up in typical applications, maybe you can start XY-probing towards the "real question".

[legends2k]

Graphics programmer here. Many times drawing a square isn't a great option in games; particularly when there are many. The usual approach is blitting them squares from raster/image data which is a mere copy of texture data into frame buffer. If you're experimenting with Bresenham's line drawing or writing a game is the right probing question here.

[Dylan16807]

If you don't know how to draw a square then it's probably not the time to worry about that level of efficiency. Figure out the method that keeps your development and learning pace as high as possible.