I don't see why it shouldn't work? The SDL2_net docs state that you need to set up SDL2 before using the library, but from the chatd example it doesn't seem to

I don't see why it shouldn't work? The SDL2_net docs state that you need to set up SDL2 before using the library, but from the chatd example it doesn't seem to depend on any of the SDL subsystems - so you'd just include SDL2 and call SDL_Init(0) before using the library.