SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) is a 3D graphics engine that uses OpenGL or DirectX depending on platform. To use it is straight forward. You will do a few rectangles on screen with little work.
I am also working with GDI+ on Windows, so I was stunned as to how slow SDL is to start in comparison. I was even more stunned as I was looking for functions to draw circles, arcs and the finer graphics. They simply don’t exist. All I find is a function to do rectangles, point collections, pictures etc.
In simple words you will have to create a proper 2D library on top of this from scratch if you want to use this as a HMI framework. I have actually done similar tasks back in the DOS days so I know that this is a large task to take on.
Don’t take me wrong! Drawing a rude circle is done in a few lines of code. Drawing a high quality graphics one require a bit more work, but doing this with high performance will require a lot of hours.
It will not be my first option!