Cross-platform error handling when the graphics API cannot be initialized

[milasudril]

Apparently, this issue has been brought up before:

Adding platform independant error boxes

wesleyhill wrote on Saturday, August 06, 2005: Generally programs that make use of GLFW handle visual interaction with the user in their own way and so the addition of platform GUI support to GLFW makes no sense. This being said, I think there’s a lot of projects that would appreciate the addition of a platform-independant error box to be used when the program has failed in some catastrophic manner and the user needs to be informed. Such situations might be: * Failure to allocate some needed m…

I want a convenient way of displaying a message like

“Failed to initialize the rendering backend. Possible issues include a missing or outdated video driver, or a too old video card. Try to reinstall the appropriate video driver and restart the computer.”

This is can be done

• By relying on using the native windowing API (X11, Wayland, Windows API, …), which requires detecting the current platform, and select the correct strategy.

• Communicating with another process, implemented using a GUI toolkit that does not require hardware acceleration (GTK, Qt, WxWidgets, …). This adds additional dependencies to the project.

Any sane option?

[dougbinks]

You could use something like:

GitHub - aaronmjacobs/Boxer: Boxer is a simple library that allows for easy...

[milasudril]

This still adds GTK as a project dependency.