Releases · libsdl-org/SDL

SDL 3.0 recommended!

The SDL development team is focusing efforts on SDL3 and making sdl2-compat a drop-in replacement for SDL2. If you run into issues with SDL2, please consider upgrading to SDL3 or trying out sdl2-compat. We have made significant improvements across all platforms and your issue may already be resolved.

This is a stable bugfix release, with the following changes:

Allow destroying a window and its renderer in either order
Added cursor-shape-v1 protocol support on Wayland
Fixed full immersive mode in Android 9 and higher
Improved event processing latency when gamepad/sensor is open
Added SDL_HINT_APPLE_RWFROMFILE_USE_RESOURCES to control whether SDL tries to open files from the app's resource directory on macOS
Fixed conditional effect playback on Moza Racing devices
Fixed input for Thrustmaster PlayStation wheels when hid-tmff2 is installed
Enabled direct VRAM access when using the window surface API on PSP
Improved window surface support on Nintendo 3DS
Fixed condition variable implementation on Nintendo 3DS
Fixed byte order detection on Solaris
Implemented SDL_TriggerBreakpoint() on aarch64-w64-mingw32

Announcing the SDL 3 official release!

SDL 3.0 is finally here!

We have many many people to thank on the road to get here, but I'd like to call out special thanks to:

@slouken and @icculus, lead developers
@flibitijibibo, @thatcosmonaut, and @TheSpydog, the GPU API team
@1bsyl, @0x1F9F1, @Kontrabant, and @Semphriss, for general development and major contributions
@madebr, our CMake wizard and build guru
@smcv, for words of wisdom and sanity checks
@sezero and @Sackzement, for dotting all our i's and crossing all our t's
... and literally hundreds of other people who have contributed feedback, pull requests, and bug reports, helping make SDL what it is today.

If you're migrating from SDL2, we've put a comprehensive list of changes and migration tips here:
https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/docs/README-migration.md

Here are some of the highlights of what's new in SDL 3.0:

Extremely good documentation: We've spent a ton of effort writing and revising the API reference.
Example programs to get you started, running in your web browser!
More consistent API naming conventions. Everything is named consistently across the API now, instead of different subsystems taking different approaches. Also, we've tended toward more descriptive names for things in SDL3.
Main Callbacks: optionally run your program from callbacks instead of main().
GPU API: access to modern 3D rendering and GPU compute in a cross-platform way.
Dialog API: access to system file dialogs (file and folder selection UI for opening/saving).
Filesystem API: simple directory management and globbing, access to topic-specific user folders.
Storage API: Abstract interface to platform-specific storage.
Camera API: access to webcams.
Pen API: access to pens (like Wacom tablets and Apple Pencil, etc).
Logical audio devices: different parts of an app can get their own unique audio device to use.
Audio streams: handle buffering, converting, resampling, mixing, channel mapping, pitch, and gain. Bind to an audio device and go!
Default audio devices: SDL3 will automatically manage migrating to new physical hardware as devices are plugged in, ripped out, or changed.
Properties API: fast, flexible dictionaries of name/value pairs.
Process API: Spawn child processes and communicate with them in various ways.
Colorspace support: Surfaces and the renderer, etc, can manage multiple colorspaces.
The Clipboard API can support any data type (SDL2 only handled text), and apps can provide data in multiple formats upon request in a provided callback.
Better keyboard input, for all your keypress needs.
Customizable virtual keyboards on iOS and Android.
High DPI support is dramatically improved over SDL2.
App metadata API for letting SDL report things about your app correctly (like in the About dialog on macOS, etc).
and much, much more.