SDL2 for macOS 9 “rough draft”

Is SDL2 just something that everyone is expected to know what it is? I was thinking it was about a Software Development Lifecycle on Mac0S9, but it clearly isn't... but there is no where in this post or that page that explains what SDL2 is.

As far as libraries go, this one is pretty well known. If you ever need to make a small game or custom gui, it's fairly easy to pick, very performant and very portable.

It is one of the most popular multimedia libraries in the world.

If you want to build a game without using an engine, but don't want to deal with talking to the hardware on your own, SDL is there.

I think that anyone that doesn't know what SDL2 is probably won't care about this announcement. Besides, when I search for "SDL2" on Google, the first 5 pages were all about the Simple Direct Media Layer library, so there shouldn't be any uncertainty.

>Is SDL2 just something that everyone is expected to know what it is?

No but it's assumed that if use a site like HN you can figure it out?

Yes, it is one of those things that I’d expect your average HN user to know about

What exactly is your background? MY first idea was that you might be very young but your account is from 2010.

Not knowing SDL feels like someone having no idea what C++ or Unreal Engine is. I am curious how you managed to avoid learning about SDL despite being on hacker news.

This is so hilarious for me, for whom SDL is truly legendary (literally decades of often daily use), and who constantly gets downvoted into a smoking hole in a ground for expressing the same sentiment about every random 7 week old JS framework or Grafana monitoring extension or whatever... the militant webdev bias on HN is super clear.

The recently released SDL3 is hot shit today, BTW: https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/FrontPage

I don't know what to say other than I am pretty sure I have never encountered it before. I have been coding for over 30 years, 20 years professionally, and have never seen it. You can see by my account age and comment history that I have been active on HN for 15 years.

I actually have interest in game programming, too. So I don't know.

I am sure I'll encounter it 10 times this week now, good old Baeder-Meinhoff

Fair, and I did, after I commented. Not exactly sure why I felt so compelled to comment, maybe because I was frustrated trying to find on the linked page what it was talking about.

I thought it was an actual game for a good chunk of time.

Thanks

This feels like an example of the XKCD comic "lucky 10000"... I guess it was just my turn to learn about it today, after 15 years actively on HN.

> Not knowing SDL feels like someone having no idea what C++ or Unreal Engine is.

I've literally never even heard the term SDL before this. I would say that it's nowhere near the same class of ubiquity as the other two examples you gave.

Oh you absolutely will. I guarantee you, you have used a lot of software that is using SDL.

https://steamdb.info/tech/SDK/SDL/

Though to be fair it kind of makes sense that you would have never used SDL yourself. It you never go that far down the stack and do stuff like write your own game engine and the like, you wouldn't really need to know it. I guess I am more aware of software dependencies as a Linux user? That is my only explanation or maybe you are really just one of those lucky 10000.

There are far more games written in SDL than in Unreal Engine.

Granted that is trivially true because Unreal Engine itself and many, many other engines use SDL internally but still. So yeah, is is way MORE ubiquitous than Unreal Engine.

I guess there is just less awareness because SDL is a lower level detail that most people don't really need to care about. It just works and powers a huge chunk of our games and software.

Nothing wrong with not knowing about it, it is just interesting to me that even in tech spaces some people are not aware of SDL. I am sure there is a lot of things I don't know either.

https://xkcd.com/1053/ seems relevant here. :)