alt Hacker NewsWait, so your wrapper around SDL_Renderer now also inexplicably contains a scratch buffer? I guess that explains why you put RenderTextToSurface on your SDL_Renderer wrapper, but ... that's some really weird API design. Why does the SDL_Renderer wrapper know how to use SDL_TTF or PangoCairo to draw text to a surface? Why does SDL_Renderer then own the resulting surface?
To anyone used to SDL, your proposed API is extremely surprising.
It would've made your point clearer if you'd explained this coupling between SDL_Renderer and text rendering in your original post.
But yes, I concede that if there was any reason to do so, putting a scratch surface into your SDL_Renderer that you can auto-resize and render text to would be a solution that makes for slightly nicer API design. Your SDL_Renderer now needs to be passed around as a parameter to stuff which only ought to need to concern itself with CPU rendering, and you now need to deal with mutexes if you have multiple goroutines rendering text, but those would've been alright trade-offs -- again, if there was a reason to do so. But there's not; the allocation is fast and the text rendering is slow.
You're right to call out that the SDLRenderer name was a poor choice. SDL is an implementation detail that should be completely hidden from the user of the API. That it may or may not use SDL under the hood is irrelevant to the user of the API. If the user wanted to use SDL, they would do so directly. The whole point of this kind of abstraction, of course, is to decouple of the dependence on something like SDL. Point taken.
Aside from my failure in dealing with the hardest problem in computer science, how would you improve the intent of the API? It is clearly improved over the original version, but we would do well to iterate towards something even better.