Not sure whether this is tested on Windows at all. I opened the header and immediately found this `typedef signed long i64`, i.e. i64 is actually i32.

I wonder where we&#x27;d be if we&#x27;d stopped relying on system packages to provide dependencies for C &#x2F; C++. It is positively miserable to have to pollute your system when a codebase written in Go &#x2F; Rust &#x2F; your favourite modern language Just Works out of the box.

We&#x27;d be at the same spot, single-header files are still useful.A single-header file is not a &#x27;full-sized&#x27; library compressed into one file it&#x27;s codebase is designed to actually be minimalist. Many libraries have single files that are the same size as their alternative single-header.

&gt; a proper package managerThose are a thing? Wasn&#x27;t aware.

Remind me please, which of these is shipped with a default Windows install?

scoop? chocolatey? pacman in msys2? winget?

Every time I see a &quot;single-header C library&quot;, I wonder to myself where we&#x27;d be if only Windows had a proper package manager.(Especially since that&#x27;d force the POSIX world to de-fracture itself too.)

This was added to raylib as a backend recently: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;raysan5&#x2F;raylib&#x2F;releases#:~:text=RGFW">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;raysan5&#x2F;raylib&#x2F;releases#:~:text=RGFW</a>

That&#x27;s something I plan on looking into at some point. I&#x27;m unsure if I want that in the main version or a separate branch for embedded devices.It&#x27;s low priority though because my main focus is desktop applications.

You could support mobile platforms as well. IIRC, even if Android allows creating only one window per activity, this behavior can be easily mapped on the abstraction that you provide.

Are you kidding? I started reading the X11 handbook series in the 1980s and now it&#x27;s 2024 and I&#x27;m nearly finished, and you want to replace it? ;-)

X11 is fine. It&#x27;s mostly just Video Games that need an alternative. It&#x27;d be nice if there was a &quot;pause X11 video card control and give exclusive access to a single application.&quot; Then there&#x27;s no need to care.

What do you expect from an alternative?

As far as I know, RGFW is the only minimal windowing of its kind. I guess I would suggest either targeting XWayland or using GLFW.The Wayland API itself also really sucks to work with, even more so than Xlib....But, RGFW&#x27;s Wayland support will probably be improved in the future. :)

Rust has a lot of those small libs, my favorite is miniquad<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crates.io&#x2F;crates&#x2F;miniquad" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;crates.io&#x2F;crates&#x2F;miniquad</a>

Isn&#x27;t SDL itself is quite minimal already? I mean, it is definitely not high-level in any sense of the word.

Waylands problem is that to use it, you need code generation so the wayland backend kinda hard to design for a header only lib.

Yeah, I&#x27;ve been looking for a minimal SDL alternative for a long time and I was really excited reading through this as that solution, but the lack of Wayland support is a huge dealbreaker for me.Are there any good minimal windowing utilities that support Wayland? SDL does a lot I don&#x27;t need and I try to maintain minimal dependencies. I suppose I could just use glfw &amp; libsoundio, haven&#x27;t tried that yet.

&gt; Wayland support is very experimental and brokenYou and everyone else, RGFW, you and everyone else.

I&#x27;m aware of the errors for the micro UI (on the web), it&#x27;s something I plan on looking into soon!

Sure, but the library is also relatively small, so it compiles quickly. 
Although if you want to you can compile it on its own.It&#x27;s also possible to compile it on its own using `gcc -c -x c -D RGFW_IMPLEMENTATION RGFW.h`Nuklear is not a true single-header style library, it only uses that as a format. The difference is that the design is far less compact and lightweight than a stb-style library.I&#x27;m pretty sure GLFW has some files that are nearly the same size as RGFW, for example.

Have you actually tried? This is 287 KB of C. MSVC on computers from 15 years ago will compile C at about 60 MB&#x2F;s. I&#x27;m skeptical this is actually a problem.SQLite is distributed as a single 6 MB .c file and compiles in ... 0.1 seconds.

The one big downside I see is that if you want to actually work on the library itself, it&#x27;s a pain to have to re-compile the entire thing every time you change something.Nuklear (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Immediate-Mode-UI&#x2F;Nuklear">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Immediate-Mode-UI&#x2F;Nuklear</a>) uses separate files with a deploy script that combines them all into a single header; I think that approach is quicker for iterating on the code.

I love single header libraries and I like the idea here of taking care of one necessity well. It seems like good modularity all around.A quick heads up, the micro UI emscripten example doesn&#x27;t work on chrome or firefox. The error is: DrawElements doesn&#x27;t actually prepareClientAttributes properly.

RGFW: Single-header C99 window abstraction library