ColleagueRiley/RGFW

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1863 stars · 83 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

RGFW is a lightweight single-header C99 library for cross-platform window creation, graphics context setup (OpenGL, Vulkan, WebGPU, Metal, DirectX), and input/event handling. It wraps only system APIs (WinAPI, X11, Wayland, Cocoa, Emscripten) with no external dependencies and does not perform rendering itself.

Use cases

• create a cross-platform window with an OpenGL context in C
• handle keyboard and mouse input for a game or tool
• set up a Vulkan or WebGPU surface without heavy dependencies
• build a minimal windowing layer for a software renderer
• compile a single-header windowing library for web via Emscripten
• replace GLFW or SDL with a smaller, hackable windowing library

When to choose

• you want a tiny, single-header, no-dependency windowing library in C
• you need direct control over the implementation and feature set
• you target Windows, macOS, Linux/X11/Wayland, or WASM
• you use any graphics API and only need window/context/event handling

When to avoid

• you need built-in rendering, audio, or higher-level game framework features
• you want a large ecosystem, extensive documentation, and battle-tested maturity like SDL or GLFW
• you need advanced platform features such as complex multi-window DPI handling out of the box

Facets

library · maturity active

graphics gui graphics cross-platform developer-tools windows wasm cross-platform cpp single-header windowing opengl vulkan pure-c x11 cocoa winapi wayland emscripten graphics-context event-handling game-development macos linux

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="ColleagueRiley/RGFW")