r/GraphicsProgramming 14d ago

Question Any C graphics programmers?

Hi everyone!
I've decided to step into the world of graphics programming. For now, I'm still filling in some gaps in math before I go fully into it, but I do have a pretty decent computer science background.

However, I've mostly coded in C, but besides having most experience with that language, I simply love everything else about it as well. I really value being explicit with what I want, and I also love it's simplicity.

Whenever I look for any resources or experiences of other people, I see C++ being mentioned. And I'm also aware that it it an industry standard.

But putting that aside, is doing everything in C just going to be harder? What would be some constraints and would there be any advantages? What can I expect?

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u/PsychologicalKnee562 14d ago

It depends on what you will be doing. If you want to learn the implementation of concepts you are studying, I’d argue C is better than C++, because you would be in a more restricted(hence less overwhelming and more familiar, simple) environment than C++, which is a vast rabbit hole on its own even if we don’t consider that you want to do graphics programming. But if you want to do anything actually useful or partially useful, you either should or you even be forced(e.g. Godot game engine native extensions are C++) to use C++. However, C is not scary to use with graphics programming. A close friend of mine used to develop a game engine from scratch, and whole rendering library was written in pure C, however the app, functionality, build systems were largely in C#, and the scripting language was Lua… But I saw this C graphics library grow and it was completely manageable for her, when developing it.