Allegro (software library)

Allegro is a software library for video game development. The functionality of the library includes support for basic 2D graphics, image manipulation, text output, audio output, MIDI music, input and timers, as well as additional routines for fixed-point and floating-point matrix arithmetic, Unicode strings, file system access, file manipulation, data files, and 3D graphics. The library is written in the C programming language and designed to be used with C, C++, or Objective-C, with bindings available for Python, Lua, Scheme, D, Go, and other languages. Allegro comes with extensive documentation and many examples. Allegro supports Windows, macOS, Unix-like systems, Android, and iOS, abstracting their application programming interfaces (APIs) into one portable interface. It can run also on top of Simple DirectMedia Layer which is used to run Allegro programs in web browser using Emscripten. Released under the terms of the zlib license, Allegro is free and open source software. Initially standing for Atari Low-Level Game Routines, Allegro was originally created by Shawn Hargreaves for the Atari ST in the early 1990s. When Hargreaves realized the platform was dying, he abandoned the Atari version, and reimplemented his work for the Borland C++ and DJGPP compilers in 1995. Support for Borland C++ was dropped in version 2.0, and DJGPP was the only supported compiler.