[pjmlp]

I never ever bothered to compile SDL/SFML from source, what is so hard dumping the binaries into a folder, set the include paths for the compiler and linker?

Although I may imagine newbies may face some challenges dealing with compiler flags.

[zamadatix]

Not much to a developer. To a novice (potentially very young) user there's confusion why there are 3 versions for e.g. Windows, which to pick from and why, how to set the compiler/linker flags for the build tuple, and then confusion about how to make it work on the alternative targets for their friends (e.g. the web target or the Linux ARM Pi target for class) and why that has to be different steps. None of that is particularly complicated once you go through it all, but it is a bit of a barrier to the "see something on the screen" magic happening to drive interest. Instead, raylib is just a header file include, like a text based "hello world", regardless of platform - even if you don't want to use the pre-made bundle.

Or, more simply, it makes the process "easy as a scripting language" rather than "pretty easy".

[flohofwoe]

> what is so hard dumping the binaries into a folder, set the include paths for the compiler and linker?

The problems already start with getting the precompiled libraries from a trusted source. As far as I'm aware the SDL project doesn't host binaries for instance.

[pjmlp]

Like these? https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases/tag/release-3.2.2...

[flohofwoe]

Yeah like these, somehow my google fu didn't bring that link up, only outdated forum posts from people looking for SDL binary releases.

[pjmlp]

No need for Google fu.

1 - Open https://www.libsdl.org/

2 - Download section on bottom left => SDL Releases

It has been there at least since SDL 2.0 early days, not feeling like tracking changes on Wayback Machine.

[fsloth]

Raylib is a pedagogical tool among other things and as such I think a kind of first principles approach has it’s merits.

But I also just use the precompiled libs :)