SDL vs Allegro

Discuss. Full disclosure: I know SDL, but not Allegro.

>>14
Xarn uses Allegro. Nobody on /prog/ uses SDL. What more do you need to know?
You can look at some of his code to see how clean the Allegro API is. It's really very decent.

Haskell doesn't have Allegro-bindings.

>>15-san,
What is a Xarn?

SDL has a macro called _THIS for use in function definitions so it can pretend to be ActionScript.

>>1
Having used both:

Allegro:
Great for making DOS-style games (with DJGPP!).  Lots of utility functions (but graphics functions are designed for 2D software blitting).  Probably more fun.

Maybe you can use OpenGL now, I haven't used Allegro in a long time.

SDL:
OK cross platform wrapper for OpenGL games.  Only basic very low-level sound functions (but there's SDL_mixer or some other library for that).  Under LGPL, which sucks.

Of course, for a larger project you can just write platform specific code for windowing an input, and as long as you use OpenGL porting shouldn't be too hard.

>>5
WTF are you talking about, the basic SDL API is dead simple (although Allegro is maybe the easiest C library ever).  Go look at wxWidgets or something if you want to see a real sepples API.  It's very common for C libraries to prefix function names to prevent naming conflicts (libpng, etc).  CamelCase is also common (Windows and Mac C APIs, etc).