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Creating a window and Vulkan context and receiving input events (e.g. what game-like applications need) is fairly trivial via Xlib but far worse in Wayland. The Xlib API also sucks compared to Win32 or Cocoa, but writing a Wayland client for something as trivial as creating and managing a window is much worse than on any other platform (see: https://www.p4m.dev/posts/29/index.html)


That's what stuff like SDL meant to abstract away.


Sure, but SDL can also only do so much to plaster over missing or optional Wayland features:

https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/README-wayland

Basic window system functionality really needs to be provided by the OS, not by 3rd-party libraries. And there's no reason why simple things like creating a window should be drastically more code in an OS API than in a wrapper library like SDL.




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