Is there any chance that SDL will get shader support in the foreseeable future?
Do you mean for the rendering subsystem? I would imagine not, because not only does it have to support systems that do not support shaders, it also has to support systems with different shading languages, versions of those shading languages, and possibly even loading version-specific functions of the backend. You can use SDL to get an OpenGL or Vulkan context to write your own renderer that supports shaders.
Love2D, for example, doesn’t use SDL’s rendering subsystem. They use their own renderer on top of OpenGL. If you want to write quick and easy 2D shaders you can try that.
TBH this whole crossplatform GPU accelerated rendering thing got a lot harder since Apple stopped supporting OpenGL (right now it’s “deprecated” in macOS, but apparently already pretty broken, and they’ll probably stop supporting it at all in a future release).
If you’re looking for GPU-accelerated 2D rendering with shader support and don’t mind OpenGL (ES) being used underneath and being required, https://github.com/grimfang4/sdl-gpu is also worth a look
SDL_gpu seems like a really nice choice. I don’t think that I will bother anymore with Apple, let them sink for good. Also saw somebody already working on vulkan support for sdl_gpu fingers crossed
Oh, cool - so via MoltenVK it could even work on Mac after all