Amethyst vs Irrlicht

Amethyst is published under the MIT license making it open-source and id offered completely free. This allows anyone to give the tiling window manger a try, which is great.

The application was written in Objective-C, but was recently updated and completely rewritten in Apple's new native language Swift.

As it's designed to work closely to how xmonad, Amethyst uses keyboard shortcuts to control the windows being used, meaning no mouse input is necessary. This can make for a faster way to control windows.

No CONFIG file provides security and will avoid making amethyst crash. Instead configured via simple UI

Many working examples to study and learn. You can easily experiment modifying an example code to grok in full how the engine works. In the beginning of your learning curve, the example code will offer you many useful code snippets.

If you are considering writing your own engine with openGL, you might want to consider Irrlicht instead. It makes many features of any engine worth its salt easy, including events, serialization, nodes, animators, materials, logging, and animation. Bring your own sound and networking.

Especially if you compile it yourself, it can be very light in memory usage.

If you want to start game developing with C++, then Irrlicht is a good candidate since it removes most of the complications in game making in C++. It will let you obtain experience in programming and games at the same time.

This engine supports multiple formats for 3D objects and textures.