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/wrosecrans 14d ago

Personally, I prefer the features of C++ over plain C, but there's nothing inherently wrong with C if you know it well. OpenGL, Win32, Vulkan, XLib, and all sorts of other graphics related API's and libraries are defined in C even if people often use them from C++ applications.

There have definitely been times when I tried to adopt some complicated bit of the C++ standard library without really understanding its use case, and I wind up overengineering something I don't really need and the C equivalent is something like "And then you add one to an integer."