Why is Steam's SDL2.dll much smaller?

Game Development
1

I’ve noticed the DLL shipped with Steam is much smaller than the one we download from SDL, does anyone know why?

Also, I’ve noticed the current DLL on Steam is 2.0.9. Is this wise? It has a few game-breaking bugs that haven’t been fixed yet.

2

(A guess…) Likely the one built by Valve is built with Visual Studio, and the one on libsdl.org is built with a gcc-based cross-compiler.

(Also a guess) on Windows, there isn’t an equivalent of the Steam Runtime, so that SDL.dll is just for Steam’s use, not for games delivered via Steam.

The Steam Client itself uses SDL for various tasks.

–ryan.

1 Like
3

There are also include\SDL_config_windows where you can cut down the possibilities