Simple DirectMedia Layer
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a library that creates an abstraction over various platforms' graphics, sound, and input APIss, allowing a developer to write a video game or other multimedia application once and run it on Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, BeOS and a few other unofficially ported platforms. It manages video, events, numeric audio, CD-ROM sound, threads and counters.
Sam Lantinga created the library in 1998. He got the idea while porting a Windows application to Macintosh. He then used SDL to port DOOM to BeOS. Sam then worked for Loki Games and other free libraries joined the SDL, such as SMPEG and OpenAL.
The SDL is mainly coded in C but has interfaces to many languages and exists on several operating systems.
See also Allegro.
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