Simple DirectMedia Layer

From Free net encyclopedia

Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform multimedia library that creates an abstraction over various platforms' graphics, sound, and input APIs, allowing a developer to write a computer game or other multimedia application once and run it on GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS Classic, Mac OS X, BeOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, QNX, IRIX, and a few other unofficially ported platforms. It manages video, events, numeric audio, CD-ROM sound, threads, and timers.

Sam Lantinga created the library, first releasing it in early 1998, while working for Loki Software. He got the idea while porting a Windows application to Macintosh. He then used SDL to port Doom to BeOS (see Doom source ports). Several other free libraries appeared to work with SDL, such as SMPEG and OpenAL.

The SDL is mainly coded in C but has bindings to many languages and exists on several operating systems.

SDL itself is very simple; it merely acts as a thin, cross-platform wrapper, providing support for 2D pixel operations, sound, file access, event handling, timing, threading, and more. OpenGL is often used with SDL to provide fast 3D rendering. It is often thought of as a cross-platform DirectX, although it lacks some if its more advanced functionality. SDL instead has a huge number of third party extensions that make it easy to do more advanced functions.

It is freely available open source and is licensed under the LGPL.