Well I was wondering, whether Allegro 5 has just been a poor attempt at "re-inventing the wheel", or what makes it "special" compared to other graphic libraries (apart from it being "free"), mostly in comparison to SDL (which seems to be its main competitor/rival).

If you don't like Allegro, don't use it. If you prefer it, use it. The people making it take some sort of pleasure in making it. What's the problem?

And I've never heard of SDL having a mind control API either

Allegro 5 comes with allegro.cc.

Oh and Allegro 5 software can generally be ported to the iPhone without changing a single line of code (unless you want to add pretty things like display orientation).

SDL will not change to D3D just to get that nice speed boost on Windows.

Also, SDL might look attractive when you see it in projects as mearly SDL.dll, but when it is used that way, generally the developer ends up doing lots of wheel reinvention, or only uses it to get a cross platform window ready for drawing; to get it up to somewhat what AL5 can do, you need sdl_mixer, sdl_gfx, etc. So it adds up too. If the big list of dll's scare you, either static link or use the nicely packaged monolith dll.

I believe also for those who want to develop in pure openGL that Allegro 5 also wrangles GL extensions, like multisampling, which is a huge pain to deal with on your own without GLEW when starting WGL programming. (Windows GL programming)

I definitely have to reiterate that allegro.cc/forums gives Allegro a huge edge over SDL.

That is true, but only to a certain point.You can be a great high level programmer and have a great object oriented design and all, but might do a bad job when trying to implement things like bitmap rotation, or UTF 8. Since these don't really require game programming skill but rather a good grasp on how the above 2 routines function at a low level which not everyone here may be able to do without making the cpu the bottleneck.

Isn't SDL written by a German bloke? if so, it's probably very efficient but not very funny. Whereas Allegro has the bloat of America, the money making capabilities of Israel, the might of the British Empire and the sexiness of the Swedish (I'd mention Canada too, but I couldn't think of anything useful to say about them).

However SDL boasts a merchandising shop where you can buy SDL branded t-shirts and mugs and a jobs forum (where last time I looked there were no jobs).

The feature list of the new SDL 1.3 ^[1] (the long awaited complete overhaul of the API) will be almost the same as Allegro 5. And SDL 1.3 will be released at almost the same time as Allegro 5

Also reading up on Wikipedia, I'd say SDL 1.2 is used by a lot more projects than Allegro 4 and always had a bit of commercial backing. Mostly from Sam Lantinga's companies (first Loki Games and later Galaxy Gameworks). But Sam is really busy earning millions as lead software engineer for World of Warcraf right now. On the other hand Trent's Nooskewl and my Allefant Games are two companies supporting A5 development, in a way. So not even sure which project does get more development right now.

Could you elaborate on this?
It's rather hard to fix things if people don't tell you what they think is wrong.

Allegro5 has a better API than SDL imho.

And as easy as kraft dinner.

So, no elaboration on why people feel that Allegro 5 is "a poor attempt", "reinventing the wheel", "incomplete" and "has problems"?

That's not very helpful, I must say.

That may be true (I don't know; I haven't used A5), but if it is it's way too hard to find that out - even with a whole bunch of additional qualifiers (e.g. "api reference"), I couldn't find a Google-reachable API reference for Allegro 5. It's equally hard for people to figure out what the official site for Allegro 5 actually is.

SDL (1.2)'s strength is that it's mature and extremely well-tested. It builds easily, the API is stable, you get OpenGL support out of the box and you can be pretty sure that any bugs that crop up are yours.

Why do you think that's what he's saying? It looks to me like he hasn't used A5 yet, and is wanting to know if it is just a "reinvention" or not before deciding whether to switch to A5 or SDL.