What caused the recent popularity of SDL

SDL Development
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Helo, I’ve been developing on SDL since 2017, at the time other libraries were more popular, but SDL seems to have taken the absolute lead by now. It’s good to see, but I wonder what caused going back to these 2/2.5D stuff ? More school projects / frofessors requiring to use it? Or people now appreciating the simpler stuff instead of the big 3D games…, or a combination of both?

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For me, it’s a combination of multiple factors.

  1. Frustration with the Web at day job, its bloat, framework gemini curse, slow mess.
  2. Wanting to do game dev.
  3. Watching and listening to people like Jonathan Blow, Casey Muratori, Bill Hall.
  4. Seeing successful games made in small engines, like Celeste, Animal Well.
  5. Itch to create something timeless, not relying on tech that can pull rug underneath. (Like Flash dying, or Unity changing pricing, or breaking changes like 2d light not working in perspective mode anymore, or 2 year old JavaScript code not running, etc)
  6. Odin vendor library - Otherwise I wouldn’t have used SDL3. I have no intention of getting into C or C++.
  7. SDL2 has always been on my radar, for being used by games that don’t use Unity or other commercial game engines.

I tried several times prior to this to get into low level programming. I was good at C & C++ in college and school days, so I could have picked it up any time. But it has lots of friction, I don’t like it at all.

I have tried several languages in my spare time, while waiting for Jai lang to solve all the problems with C & C++. (Zig, Golang (For WebDev), Elixir (For WebDev), Rust, C#, Lua (Love2D), and Odin.)

Odin is what finally clicked for me. It is just perfect for me. Simple like C, as I remember, with no convoluted build system, batteries included and modern Data oriented design built in.

Then came the concern of which library to use. I heard lots of things about Raylib, Sokol and SDL.

Luckily SDL3 comes as part of the Odin vendor library and Dan Korostelev had a SDL3 GPU series.

So it’s been 3 or 4 months since I have been learning and working on my stuff. (With 2 months hiatus)

Never been happier. I feel more fulfilled working with Odin + SDL3 GPU than any other tech.

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I suspect the release of SDL3 has probably spurred some interest.

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