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Why is SDL API needed vs gfx-rs / wgpu though? I.e. was there a need to make yet another one?

• modeless 2y ago
  The more the merrier if you ask me. Eventually one will win but we need more experimentation in this space. The existing GPU APIs are too hard to use and/or vendor-specific.
  • TillE 2y ago
    Writing bits of Vulkan or D3D12 really isn't that bad if you're working within an engine which does most of the setup for you, which is nearly always the case for practical work. If you're doing everything yourself from scratch, you're probably either a hobbyist tinkering or a well-compensated expert working for a AAA game developer.
    • monocasa 2y ago
      If you're targeting SDL, then you probably don't have an engine, or you are the engine.
    • gmueckl 2y ago
      Nit: there are also really sophisticated graphics engines for serious applications. It's not only games.
    • flohofwoe 2y ago
      Using something like Unreal or Unity if you just want to blast a couple of triangles to the screen in a cross-platform application is a bit overkill.
• adrift 2y ago
  Having a C API like that is always nice. I don't wanna fight Rust.
  • Encounter 2y ago
    WebGPU has a (mostly) standardized C API: https://github.com/webgpu-native/webgpu-headers https://github.com/webgpu-native/webgpu-headers
    • westurner 2y ago
      wgpu supports WebGPU: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu : > While WebGPU does not support any shading language other than WGSL, we will automatically convert your non-WGSL shaders if you're running on WebGPU.
      • dartos 2y ago
        That’s just for the shading language
        • flohofwoe 2y ago
          The Rust wgpu project has an alternative C API which is identical (or at least closely matches, I haven't looked in detail at it yet) the official webgpu.h header. For instance all examples in here are written in C: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-native/tree/trunk/examples https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-native/tree/trunk/examples There's definitely also people using wgpu from Zig via the C bindings.
          • westurner 2y ago
            I found: shlomnissan/sdl-wasm: https://github.com/shlomnissan/sdl-wasm https://github.com/shlomnissan/sdl-wasm : > A simple example of compiling C/SDL to WebAssembly and binding it to an HTML5 canvas. erik-larsen/emscripten-sdl2-ogles2: https://github.com/erik-larsen/emscripten-sdl2-ogles2 https://github.com/erik-larsen/emscripten-sdl2-ogles2 : > C++/SDL2/OpenGLES2 samples running in the browser via Emscripten IDK how much work there is to migrate these to SDL3? Are there WASM compilation advantages to SDL3 vs SDL2?
  • westurner 2y ago
• throwup238 2y ago
  SDL the library is over a quarter century old. It powers tons of existing software. Why wouldn't people keep working on it?
  • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    They already broke compat for 2.x, and existing games don't have shaders in 1.x or 2.x, right? So why make their own API?
    • badsectoracula 2y ago
      Yes and no. SDL 2.x is not backwards compatible with SDL 1.x (and that was an annoyance of mine) but at some point someone wrote an SDL 1.x implementation on top of SDL 2.x that got official blessing, so at least games using SDL 1.x can be made to use SDL 2.x "under the hood" be it in source code form or binary-only form. Though you can't take an SDL 1.x game and convert it piecemeal to SDL 2.x as the APIs are not backwards compatible, it is an all-or-nothing change.
      • gmueckl 2y ago
        The API breaks in SDL2 were sorely needed, if you asked me. SDL1 painted itself into a corner in a few places, e.g. simultaneous use of multiple displays/windows.
        • badsectoracula 2y ago
          I don't think they were needed but i value not breaking existing programs and code more than some abstract and often highly subjective form of code purity. The compatibility layer that was introduced a few years later did solve the "SDL1 apps running under SDL2 under the hood (though with some regressions)" compatibility issue, it did somewhat solve the "compile existing code that uses SDL1 with SDL2" (depending on your language and SDL bindings, i had to compile the real SDL 1.2 library to have Free Pascal's bindings work since they didn't work with sdl12-compat) but it did not solve the "updating existing code to use the new features without rewriting everything" compatibility issue (there was even some user in the PR or Twitter asking about future plans for compatibility because he had spent years updating his code from SDL 1.2 to SDL 2.0 and didn't want to repeat the process again - FWIW the answer was that it probably wont be any less than 10 years for a new major backwards incompatible version).
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• dottrap 2y ago
  The old SDL 2D API was not powerful enough. It was conceived in the rectangle sprite blitting days, when video hardware was designed very differently and had drastically different performance characteristics. If you wanted anything more, OpenGL used to be 'the best practice'. But today, the landscape competes between Vulkan, Metal, and Direct3D, and hardware is centered around batching and shaders. Trying to target OpenGL is more difficult because OpenGL fragmented between GL vs. GLES and platform support for OpenGL varies (e.g. Apple stopped updating GL after 4.1). A good example demonstrating where the old SDL 2D API is too limited is with the 2D immediate mode GUI library, Nuklear. It has a few simple API stubs to fill in so it can be adapted to work with any graphics system. But for performance, it wants to batch submit all the vertices (triangle strip). But SDL's old API didn't support anything like that. The reluctance was the SDL maintainers didn't want to create a monster and couldn't decide where to draw the line, so the line was held at the old 2D API. Then a few years ago, a user successfully changed the maintainers' minds after writing a demonstration showing how much could be achieved by just adding a simple batching API to SDL 2D. So that shifted the mindset and led to this current effort. I have not closely followed the development, but I think it still aims to be a simple API, and you will still be encouraged to pick a full blown 3D API if you go beyond 2D needs. But you no longer should need to go to one of the other APIs to do 2D things in modern ways on modern hardware.
  • shmerl 2y ago
    I see, interesting.
  • HexDecOctBin 2y ago
    I think you are getting confused between SDL_Render and SDL_GPU. SDL_Render is the old accelerated API that was only suitable for 2D games (or very primitive looking 3D ones). SDL_GPU is a fully-featured wrapper around modern 3D APIs (well, the rasteriser and compute parts anyway, no raytracing or mesh shaders there yet).
    • dottrap 2y ago
      I was referencing the historical motivations that led to where we are today. Yes, I was referring in part to the SDL_Render family APIs. These were insufficient to support things like Nuklear and Dear ImGui, which are reasonable use cases for a simple 2D game, which SDL hoped to help with by introducing the SDL_Render APIs in SDL 2.0 in the first place. https://www.patreon.com/posts/58563886 https://www.patreon.com/posts/58563886 Short excerpt: One day, a valid argument was made that basic 2D triangles are pretty powerful in themselves for not much more code, and it notably makes wiring the excellent Dear Imgui library to an SDL app nice and clean. Even here I was ready to push back but the always-amazing Sylvain Becker showed up not just with a full implementation but also with the software rendering additions and I could fight no longer. In it went. The next logical thing people were already clamoring for back then was shader support. Basically, if you can provide both batching (i.e. triangles) and shaders, you can cover a surprising amount of use cases, including many beyond 2D. So fast forwarding to today, you're right. Glancing at the commit, the GPU API has 80 functions. It is full-featured beyond its original 2D roots. I haven't followed the development enough to know where they are drawing the lines now, like would raytracing and mesh shaders be on their roadmap, or would those be a bridge too far.
• badsectoracula 2y ago
  SDL provides various "backend agnostic" APIs for a variety of needs, including window creation, input (with a gamepad abstraction), audio, system stuff (e.g. threads), etc so that programs written against SDL can work on a variety of systems - and if linked against it dynamically (or using the "static linking but with a dynamic override" that allows a statically linked version to use a newer dynamic version of the library) can use newer/better stuff (which is sometimes needed, e.g. some older gaming using old version of SDL1.x need the DLL/.so replaced to a new version to work on new OSes, especially on Linux). Exposing a modern (in the sense of how self-proclaimed modern APIs like Vulkan, D3D12 and Metal work) GPU API that lets applications written against it to work with various backends (D3D11, D3D12, Vulkan, Metal, whatever Switch and PS5 uses, etc) fits perfectly with what SDL already does for every other aspect of making a game/game engine/framework/etc. As if it was "needed", it was needed as much as any other of SDL's "subsystems": strictly speaking, not really as you could use some other library (but that could be said for SDL itself) but from the perspective of what the SDL wants to provide (an API to target so you wont have to target each underlying API separately) it was needed for the sake of completeness (previously OpenGL was used for this task if you wanted 3D graphics but that was when OpenGL was practically universally available for the platforms SDL itself officially supported - but nowadays this is not the case).
• TinkersW 2y ago
  WebGPU would be alot more useful if it hadn't gone with such a needlessly different shader language syntax, makes it much harder to have any single src between the C++ and it.
  • truckerbill 2y ago
    The bigger problem is the lack of bindless textures etc
  • wiz21c 2y ago
    can't you use naga to reuse OpenGL shaders for example ?
• WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
  SDL is for gamedevs, it supports consoles, wgpu is not, it doesn't
  • hnlmorg 2y ago
    SDL is for everyone. I use it for a terminal emulator because it’s easier to write something cross platform in SDL than it is to use platform native widgets APIs.
    • WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
      You are right, I was too focused on the gamedev argument that it made me use an incorrect statement
    • westurner 2y ago
      Can the SDL terminal emulator handle up-arrow /slash commands, and cool CLI things like Textual and IPython's prompt_toolkit readline (.inputrc) alternative which supports multi line editing, argument tab completion, and syntax highlighting?, in a game and/or on a PC?
      • debugnik 2y ago
        I think you're confusing the roles of terminal emulator and shell. The emulator mainly hosts the window for a text-based application: print to the screen, send input, implement escape sequences, offer scrollback, handle OS copy-paste, etc. The features you mentioned would be implemented by the hosted application, such as a shell (which they've also implemented separately).
        • westurner 2y ago
          Does the SDL terminal emulator support enough of VT100, is it, to host an [in-game] console shell TUI with advanced features?
          • 2y ago
• flohofwoe 2y ago
  While WebGPU isn't a bad API, it also isn't exactly the '3D API to end all 3D APIs'. WebGPU has a couple of design decisions which were necessary to support Vulkan on mobile devices, which make it a very rigid API and even (desktop) Vulkan is moving away from that rigid programming model, while WebGPU won't be able to adapt so quickly because it still needs to support outdated mobile GPUs across all operating systems.
• flohofwoe 2y ago
  One important point I haven't seen mentioned yet is that SDL is the defacto minimal compatibility layer on Linux for writing a windowed 'game-y' application if you don't want to directly wrestle with X11, Wayland, GTK or KDE.
  • ahartmetz 2y ago
    Yeah - getting an OpenGL (and presumably same for Vulkan) context is surprisingly annoying if you don't have a library to help you. It also works quite differently on X11, Wayland, or directly on kernel APIs. Many games that don't otherwise use SDL2 (such as ones ported from other platforms, i.e. most games) use it just for that.