&gt; Basically, I&#x27;m talking about the sorts of relatively low-level APIs whose use is somewhat obligatory for Getting Stuff Done in a performant way, and for which higher-level interfaces typically deny sufficient control and&#x2F;or hurt performance by heavily wrapping (and often quietly copying&#x2F;rearranging) the critical data structures and operations. Things like ioctl() calls, OpenGL&#x2F;DirectX, and so on. Misusing these (or just encountering bugs in them) can pretty easily trash your application -- and sometimes even your kernel -- in really messy ways.<p>OK, but that&#x27;s why glium is so popular (quite possibly the preferred OpenGL binding in the community nowadays?), which has very low overhead while maintaining OpenGL safety.<p>ioctls have similar wrappers for the important ones.