If you’re using assembly, then you’ve already given up on the easy ways.
This site has a bunch of samples in various programming languages for an X11 Hello World, including Assembly.
1, Don’t target X11 specifically these days. Yes a lot of people still use it or at least support it in a backward-compatible manner, but Wayland is only increasing.
2, Don’t fear the use of libraries. SDL and GTK, being C-based, should both be feasible from assembly; at most you might want to build a C program that dumps constants (if
-dMdoesn’t suffice) and struct offsets (if you don’t want to hard-code them).If you do go X11 and want to go low-level, I’d recommend libxcb over libx11.
The problem with XCB is that it’s designed to be efficient, not easy. If you’re avoiding toolkits for some reason, “so what if I block the world” may be a reasonable tradeoff.
