raylib

raylib is a simple and easy-to-use C library designed to make video game programming enjoyable and accessible for beginners, hobbyists, and educators. Created by Ramon Santamaria (raysan5), it is inspired by the Borland BGI graphics library and the XNA framework, providing a minimalist, immediate-mode API that gets out of the way and lets developers focus on game logic rather than boilerplate setup code. Unlike full-featured game engines like Unity or Godot, raylib is intentionally lightweight and code-centric: there is no visual editor, no asset pipeline, no entity-component system — just a straightforward set of functions for drawing, input handling, audio playback, and window management. This makes it an ideal teaching tool for game development courses and for developers who want to understand the fundamentals of game programming from the ground up. The library provides over 500 functions organized into modules: Window and Graphics (window creation, OpenGL context, VSync, fullscreen), Shapes (drawing lines, circles, rectangles, triangles, polygons), Textures (2D texture loading, rendering, sprite sheets), Text (font loading, text rendering with custom fonts), Models (3D model loading from OBJ, GLTF, IQM formats, mesh generation, 3D drawing), Shaders (GLSL shader loading and uniform management), Audio (sound and music loading, playback, streaming), and Input (keyboard, mouse, gamepad, touch). raylib supports 30+ programming language bindings including Python, Go, Rust, Ruby, Lua, and more. As of 2026, raylib has over 23,000 GitHub stars and is licensed under the zlib license.