SDL VS zls

Compare SDL vs zls and see what are their differences.

SDL

Simple Directmedia Layer (by libsdl-org)

zls

A Zig language server supporting Zig developers with features like autocomplete and goto definition (by zigtools)
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SDL zls
194 14
8,157 2,337
4.2% 5.6%
10.0 9.8
6 days ago 9 days ago
C Zig
zlib License MIT License
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

zls

Posts with mentions or reviews of zls. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-06.
  • Have questions/requests/issues related to the Zig Language Server?
    5 projects | /r/Zig | 6 May 2023
    There is no official documentation but the standard library provides definitions for the exchange format and an incomplete set of function for exchanging messages in Client.zig and Server.zig. You can find examples of the zig compile server in action in my PR for ZLS and a showcase of hot-code-swapping by kubkon. The code that implements the ZCS in the zig codebase can be found here.
  • Question about zls
    1 project | /r/Zig | 20 Apr 2023
    Same experience here, I did file a bug about it too: https://github.com/zigtools/zls/issues/1139
  • Lack of instructions on using IDEs to start playing with Zig
    1 project | /r/Zig | 13 Apr 2023
    Welcome to the word of new languages, I think rust just got an intellij plugin late last year and its been in 1.0 since 2015 (not to mention the years of hype around it). When it comes to "non standard" languages (meaning not the industries current go to for a given niche), it helps to assume there's no "It's just works" type editor support. Luckily most languages, even new ones have LSP servers including zig, and editors like VSCode make it pretty simple to use them.
  • ZLS in VSCode not signaling (all) errors
    1 project | /r/Zig | 16 Mar 2023
  • Allow download in build flake's build phase.
    4 projects | /r/Nix | 23 Feb 2023
    For the people who come in the future and want to know how to do it, here is the code as of today (at some point it will be in ZLS repository - github.com/zigtools/zls - and you should take a look there too to see more up-to-date code).
  • Zig is now self–hosted by default
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Aug 2022
  • Help building ZLS
    1 project | /r/Zig | 9 May 2022
    Commands: git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/zigtools/zls cd zls zig build -Drelease-safe
  • Ask HN: What tool would you buy to make your life easier?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 May 2022
  • Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jan 2022
    > Building is slow. It takes about ~3 seconds minimum which is frustratingly slow when I'm fighting basic syntax errors. I wish there was a fast zig check.

    > Lack of zig-analyzer makes learning hard.

    > zig fmt src/main.zig is nice. Wish it automatically ran on all files.

    I also did (well, "am doing", can only work a bit each day and am plugging through day 7 right now) AdventOfCode in Zig this year.

    These points here didn't resonate with me at all. I wonder if the author knew about or tried ZLS[0]. I had it on and integrated with my VSCode and it would check a lot of things as I went and format on save. I think I followed something like this[1] to set it up.

    [0] https://github.com/zigtools/zls

  • How in the world do you set up nvim-cmp?
    7 projects | /r/neovim | 23 Dec 2021
    cd $HOME/.local/zls && curl -L https://github.com/zigtools/zls/releases/download/0.9.0/x86_64-macos.tar.xz | tar -xJ --strip-components=1 -C .

What are some alternatives?

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

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

zig.vim - Vim configuration for Zig

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

Neovim-from-scratch - 📚 A Neovim config designed from scratch to be understandable

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

nvim-treesitter - Nvim Treesitter configurations and abstraction layer

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

zig - General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.

DS4Windows - Like those other ds4tools, but sexier

nvim-dap - Debug Adapter Protocol client implementation for Neovim

DualSenseSupport - Preliminar DualSense

zigup - Download and manage zig compilers.