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Engine, wrapper, API... are they the same?
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No, these 3 things are all different.
API is an Application Programming Interface. It''s a set of functions that allow you to achieve certain goals - an interface for a given language.
A wrapper is a different kind of interface, which usually uses one or more APIs internally. The idea is that the wrapper performs common tasks automatically, making those common tasks simpler or even trivial. Sometimes you lose some flexibility this way. You talk about a wrapper in the context of the functions or API that it ''wraps''.
And an engine could arguably be considered to be something like a ''wrapper'' but it does a lot more work, and manages its own data. In a sense an engine is more of a heavyweight API, but it certainly does a lot more than ''make the API simpler'' because there are different design decisions in each engine as to how to handle data, which features to implement, and so on.
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API is an Application Programming Interface. It''s a set of functions that allow you to achieve certain goals - an interface for a given language.
A wrapper is a different kind of interface, which usually uses one or more APIs internally. The idea is that the wrapper performs common tasks automatically, making those common tasks simpler or even trivial. Sometimes you lose some flexibility this way. You talk about a wrapper in the context of the functions or API that it ''wraps''.
And an engine could arguably be considered to be something like a ''wrapper'' but it does a lot more work, and manages its own data. In a sense an engine is more of a heavyweight API, but it certainly does a lot more than ''make the API simpler'' because there are different design decisions in each engine as to how to handle data, which features to implement, and so on.
[ MSVC Fixes | STL Docs | SDL | Game AI | Sockets | C++ Faq Lite | Boost
Asking Questions | Organising code files | My stuff | Tiny XML | STLPort]
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