SDL VS linux

Compare SDL vs linux and see what are their differences.

SDL

Simple Directmedia Layer (by libsdl-org)

linux

Linux kernel source tree (by torvalds)
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SDL linux
194 980
8,157 170,074
4.2% -
10.0 10.0
6 days ago about 17 hours ago
C C
zlib License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

SDL

Posts with mentions or reviews of SDL. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-19.
  • C-Macs – a pure C macOS application
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2024
    The linked project doesn't use any ObjC files at all. SDL2 has a bunch of Cocoa files[1] so you did use Cocoa even if unknowingly.

    [1] https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/tree/main/src/video/cocoa

  • Revert "video: Prefer Wayland over X11 (take 2)"
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Mar 2024
    Correct. It's explained here:

    https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/9345#issuecomment-201...

    XWayland has special hooks into the compositors that normal wayland clients don't get.

  • Semantic Patching in C with Coccinelle
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Dec 2023
    Found about this through the release of SDL 3: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/build-scripts/SD...
  • reflect-cpp - Now with compile time extraction of field names from structs and enums using C++-20.
    9 projects | /r/cpp | 9 Dec 2023
    https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/include/SDL3/SDL_events.h
  • BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Nov 2023
    If that app ran in a 640x480 mode, memory accesses would be just as fast as the VGA applications 25 years ago, correct?

    I think there's a lot more going on than that. Here's SDL's current pixel access code:

    https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/SDL_su...

  • Games! How they write code for SDL (+ interview with the creator)
    1 project | dev.to | 17 Nov 2023
    We use the code examples throughout the article. The ellipsis characters "...." in the code were added by the author of the article. You can find the source files on the official GitHub of libsdl. In addition, each fragment has a reference to a specific area in the code. By the time this article is published, many errors will have already been fixed thanks to the issues we opened (for example, here and there). However, the links in the examples point exactly to the code you see in this article. Not only do we enjoy teasing developers but we also like making their projects a little bit better!
  • Regarding including external libraries and prefix folders.
    1 project | /r/cpp_questions | 30 Sep 2023
    FetchContent_Declare(SDL2 GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL.git GIT_TAG release-2.28.3 ) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(SDL2)
  • SDL3 Filesystem API RFC
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Aug 2023
  • Chip8 emulator
    2 projects | /r/EmuDev | 17 Aug 2023
    It's not that difficult, I recently started learning to use graphics APIs myself. OpenGL is for linux, etc., directx for windows and vulkan for all platforms. I read through a bunch of forums yesterday and decided to go for vulkan (here is a link to the sdk) for my next small projects because it can run on all platforms. I would recommend to watch a basic tutorial series (like this one) for the graphics api itself to get an understanding of whats going on. And on top of that I use SDL2 for eventhandling and ImGui for the graphical user interface. Here is a link to a guide for setting up vulkan on your platform in case you would go for it.
  • Felt Cute, Might git rm --rf
    3 projects | dev.to | 11 Aug 2023
    SDL (which will be bumped to SDL3), straight from the authoritative https://github.com/libsdl-org/sdl

linux

Posts with mentions or reviews of linux. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-17.
  • Linus Torvalds adds arbitrary tabs to kernel code
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2024
    These are a bit easier to see what's going on:

    https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/d5cf50dafc9dd5faa1e...

    https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/d5cf50dafc9dd5faa1e61...

    Unfortunately Github doesn't have a way to render symbols for whitespace, but you can tell by selecting the spaces that the previous version had leading tabs. Linus changed it so that the tokens `default` and the number e.g. `12` are also separated by a tab. This is tricky, because the token "default" is seven characters, it will always give this added tab a width of 1 char which makes it always layout the same as if it were a space no matter if you use tab widths of 1, 2, 4, or 8.

  • Show HN: Running TempleOS in user space without virtualization
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Apr 2024
  • PfSense Software Embraces Change: A Strategic Migration to the Linux Kernel
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Apr 2024
    There was also a Gentoo effort to run atop FreeBSD[0]. The challenge of course is that afaik none of the BSD kernel ABIs are considered stable. The stable interface is the BSD libc. That said, with binfmt_misc, I don't see a reason you couldn't just run (at least some) FreeBSD binaries on Linux with a thin syscall translation layer (rather something like qemu-system) and then your layer hooked via binfmt_misc. I'm not aware of anyone who has done this for FreeBSD, but prior efforts existed as alternate binfmts for SysVr4/5 ELF binaries[2]. Either way would take some elbow grease, but you *might* even be able just reuse binfmt_elf and just have a new interpreter for FreeBSD elf.

    [0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_FreeBSD

    [1] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.html

    [2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/binfmt_elf....

  • Improvements to static analysis in GCC 14
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Apr 2024
    > The original less-than check was deemed incorrect

    It was only deemed incorrect because of an information leak. Not because it's a valid use-case for user space to copy smaller portions of *hwrpb into user space. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/21c5977a836e399fc71...

  • Linus Torvalds accepts a merge commit to the Linux kernel
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
  • TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Mar 2024
    Correct. And the combined work needs to carry the MIT license text and copyright attributions for the MIT software authors. With binary distribution it must also be overt, not hidden in some source code drop, but directly accompanying the binary.

    Many people who talk about relicensing never credit the MIT developers or distribute the MIT license text. "Because it's GPL now."

    I don't think that you believe that, but many developers do.

    Some don't see the need for source code scans for Open Source compliance, because the license.txt says GPL, so it's GPL. Prime example is the Linux kernel. There is code under different licenses in there, but people don't even read https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/COPYING till the end ("In addition, other licenses may also apply.") and conclude it's simply GPL 2 and nothing else.

    Also be aware that sublicensing is not the same as relicensing.

  • Linus Torvalds is looking for a more modern GUI editor
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Feb 2024
    > Does he have something against it?

    He notoriously hates GNU Emacs, yes.

    https://marc.info/?m=122955159617722

    https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...

  • The Linux Kernel Prepares for Rust 1.77 Upgrade
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2024
    So If we would only count code and not comments, it is only 9489 LoC Rust. Which would be about 0.03% and if we take all lines and not only LoC it would be around 0.05%

    [0] https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei

    [1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b401b621758e46812da...

  • Proposed Windows NT sync driver brings big Wine/Proton performance improvements
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Jan 2024
    AIUI fsync is built on futex_waitv which has been upstreamed. So this has to be more than that.

    https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/a0eb2da92b715d0c97b...

  • Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2024
    git clone --no-checkout --depth 1 https://github.com/torvalds/linux.git $dir

What are some alternatives?

When comparing SDL and linux you can also consider the following projects:

GLFW - A multi-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, window and input

zen-kernel - Zen Patched Kernel Sources

raylib - A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming

DS4Windows - Like those other ds4tools, but sexier

Godot - Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine

winapps - Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration.

olcPixelGameEngine - The official distribution of olcPixelGameEngine, a tool used in javidx9's YouTube videos and projects

Open and cheap DIY IP-KVM based on Raspberry Pi - Open and inexpensive DIY IP-KVM based on Raspberry Pi

serenity - The Serenity Operating System 🐞

DualSenseSupport - Preliminar DualSense

DsHidMini - Virtual HID Mini-user-mode-driver for Sony DualShock 3 Controllers