Allegro is a portable library mainly aimed at video game and multimedia programming, originally started by Shawn Hargreaves for the DJGPP compiler in a mixture of C and assembler. According to the Oxford Companion to Music, Allegro is the Italian for "quick, lively, bright". It is also a recursive acronym which stands for "Allegro Low LEvel Game ROutines". This is the legacy 4.x branch, for the current version see devel/allegro5.