SDL2 Plans With Wayland, SDL3 Already On The Mind

While SDL 2.0 was finally released this week after being in development for years, future SDL 2.x features and changes are already being plotted and even some early thoughts concerning SDL 3.x for game developers and other cross-platform developers relying upon this important Simple DirectMedia Layer library.

Ryan "Icculus" Gordon wrote yesterday on his Google+ page about the SDL 2.0 release and then the plans for the future. Some key takeaways include:

- There's already ideas about API/ABI changes that will go into SDL 3.0.0+. Of course, SDL3 is still a long ways away.

- New APIs that can be added onto SDL2 (for say SDL 2.1.0) include audio/microphone recording, webcam/video capturing, a locale API, re-introducing multiple mice support, possible multiple keyboard support, audio device disconnect notification support, and sRGB OpenGL context support.

- Some changes that could land at anytime for SDL2 (such as SDL 2.0.1 or SDL 2.1.0) include Wayland support, Mir support, Raspberry Pi support, 7.1 audio support, a possible Sony PlayStation 4 port, moving from Xlib to XCB, udev audio device support, and other code improvements.

- Speaking of Wayland support for SDL, Ryan Gordon and Kristian Høgsberg confirmed via Twitter that the external Wayland-SDL branch will hopefully be merged soon and this Wayland back-end could very well premiere in SDL 2.0.1.