My opinion is Simple Direct Layer 2  library is awesome piece of code. SDL2 delivers 99.9% what it promises. When SDL2 works it makes good habit to stay away your mind but now I want to talk about when SDL2 doesn’t work and when you want to deliver closed source application.

It seems that there is some problems with  OpenGL/DirectX and other accelerations APIs that they don’t play together without tweaking and researching ways to make them work. Okay this ain’t SDL2 fault completely this manufacturer problem again but.. you use SDL2 to get rid of hardware problems.

All those problems are solvable with current SDL2 version but again they takes lots of time and someone who is willing to debug application in non-working machine and remember this is normal stuff in development and not a big thing. But it’s big thing when you are about to releasing your new bling bling game with megalomanic blitting and your surfaces starts to blink every time you blit with some random machines. Even in not so bling bling UnReal Wolrd RPG you have problem with that but they are solved now but I builded many many Mac OS X and Linux builds before problem was traced to SDL2 related. If you are Apple people I point my finger to you. What the heck you are doing to openGL in Mac OS X??

SDL2 is what open source library but their biggest problems (in my opinion) are these: Hey Wiki is nice but have proper Doxygen or something documentation (which should be official), You have Bugzilla but there is no connection (or I just didn’t noticed) how bugs and Mercurial repository communicate each other and where/how you communicate with you users (mailinglists are so 90′ how about posting some news)?

What this leads is people post patches to Bugzilla where they get to nowhere and other one are using them because they solve their problem. This leads in situation where there is unofficial SDL2 libraries that are not compatible with each other. This is normal situation in open source world and SDL2 is under ZLib license so you can do it but what happens when they fix something that was broken to official SDL2 library and you using older one in development that is patched to work?

This is not SDL2 specific thing it’s very common situation with many open source projects (and yes they tend to have limited man power if you like to fix them you can! Learn to communicate with those people like I should with SDL2 people) but in a way SDL2 have deep connection with Valve (They use it in Linux steam client at least) and Steam ain’t small company they should but power behind this or let it go.

At the end remember this ain’t rant against SDL2 or SDL2 developers. They are doing hard work for you getting mostly nothing out of it. Because Eastern is all about pain and unhappiness so this was my contribution to that or no not really people!! Life is too short for sadness so have a lot’s of fun all eastern!