barnacle wrote:
(you might want both edges of a key press, as Windows did (does? I'm out of touch) in an event loop).
Windows does keep track of the make/break state of each key on the keyboard (somewhat) for video games.
Imagine if you will a typical modern game these days that likes to use WSAD for forward, backward, left, and right movement. Very often players will push Some combination of Forward+Side or Backward+Side.
They may also have something like 'F' to interact, or 'Space' to jump.
If all you want to do is type, then yea, keeping detailed track of the make/break codes doesn't make sense. Last key pressed is good enough, but if the game engine forgot you were pressing "forward" when you hit "jump" and you ended up falling into the bottomless pit because of it, you wouldn't have very happy players.