GitHub - What's the difference between branch SDL2 and release-2....

SDL Development
1

vs

What’s the difference ?

Also:

the release DLL Release 2.28.4 · libsdl-org/SDL · GitHub is 2.5 MB.

The SDL2 branch DLL built by my VS2022 is only 1.5 MB.

“How come” ?

2

The version you are referring to (from the link for 2.28.4) includes both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of the precompiled (binary) libraries, so it should be about 800KB larger in size.

3

The SDL2 branch is the current SDL2 state, and the release-2.28.4 branch is the state of SDL2 landed to release 2.28.4.

DLL from github is compiled with GNU toolchain and linked with static libgcc.