A similar idea involving the amount of low-level housekeeping needed, can be seen in the Gtk2::DrawingArea. See Drawing with Perl/Gtk2 (the code needs some cleanup but works) and compare the DrawingArea to the Gnome2Canvas, and/or GooCanvas. Compare in how they maintain persistence of screen elements, and the extra housekeeping required. The same comparison goes for comparing SDL to Tk or Gtk2.... the lower level toolkit of SDL is faster but requires more house keeping.