Cinder

A minimal, beginner-friendly 2D graphics library for C.

What is Cinder

SDL2 is a powerful foundation, but it asks you to manage renderers, surfaces, and event queues before you can draw a circle. Cinder sits on top of SDL2 and collapses that setup into a single header and a straightforward game loop, so a beginner can focus on building something instead of configuring something. It is not a game engine — there are no scenes, no entities, no editor — just a clean API for a window, input, and drawing.

Getting Started

A Cinder program looks like this:

#include <cinder/cinder.h>

int main(void)
{
    if (CinderInit(CINDER_SUBSYSTEM_ALL) != CINDER_STATUS_OK)
        return 1;

    if (CinderCreateWindow(CinderDefaultWindowDesc()) != CINDER_STATUS_OK)
        return 1;

    while (CinderIsRunning())
    {
        CinderBeginFrame();

        CinderClearBackground(CINDER_BLACK);

        CinderEndFrame();
    }

    CinderQuit(); // cleans up window, renderer, and SDL
    return 0;
}

Building & Installation

Tested on Linux and macOS. Windows support is experimental — MSVC has stricter C compliance requirements that may require source changes.

Dependencies

Install the required libraries before building.

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev libsdl2-gfx-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev libsdl2-mixer-dev

# Arch
sudo pacman -S sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_gfx sdl2_ttf sdl2_mixer

Building Cinder

git clone https://github.com/UniquePython/cinder.git
cd cinder
cmake -B build
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)
sudo cmake --install build

Using Cinder in Your Project

CMake:

find_package(Cinder REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(your_target PRIVATE Cinder::Cinder)

Makefile / manual:

CFLAGS  += $(shell pkg-config --cflags cinder)
LIBS    += $(shell pkg-config --libs cinder)

Raw gcc:

gcc main.c $(pkg-config --cflags --libs cinder) -o myapp

Then include the header:

#include <cinder/cinder.h>

API Overview

Module	Header	Description
Subsystem	cinder/cinder_subsystem.h	Initialize and shut down Cinder subsystems
Window	cinder/cinder_window.h	Create and destroy the application window
Loop	cinder/cinder_loop.h	Game loop control — begin frame, end frame, quit
Input	cinder/cinder_input.h	Keyboard and mouse state, per-frame and held queries
Drawing	cinder/cinder_draw.h	Lines, circles, triangles, rectangles
Textures	cinder/cinder_texture.h	Load, draw, and destroy image textures
Audio	cinder/cinder_audio.h	Load and play sound effects and music
Blend Modes	cinder/cinder_blend.h	Set blend modes globally or per-texture — none, alpha, additive, multiply
Text & Fonts	cinder/cinder_text.h	Load fonts, draw text, cache rendered text
Timers	cinder/cinder_timer.h	Delta time, FPS, and general-purpose timers
RNG	cinder/cinder_rng.h	PCG32 random number generator — integers, floats, directions, and a global convenience API
Math & Types	cinder/cinder_math.h	Vectors, points, sizes, rectangles, circles and math operations. Linkable without SDL as Cinder::Math
Plugins	cinder/cinder_plugin.h	Register and manage lifecycle plugins with init, update, draw, and shutdown callbacks
Error & Logging	cinder/cinder_error.h	Error state, log callbacks, and the CINDER_LOG macro

Examples

The examples/ directory contains Pong, Snake and Pendulum built with Cinder.

Figure 1: Pong game in Cinder

Figure 2: Snake game in Cinder

Figure 3: Single Pendulum simulation in Cinder

License

Cinder is licensed under the MIT License.

Acknowledgements

Cinder was heavily inspired by raylib and its philosophy of making graphics programming simple and accessible.