SDL 3 Released / News / January 22, 2025 / SDL, or the Simple DirectMedia Layer is one of the most important open-source game development frameworks and they just released SDL 3. Well technically its SDL 3.2.0, but it is the first production ready version of the SDL 3 branch. Key features of SDL 3 include:Extremely good documentation: Weve spent a ton of effort writing and revising the API reference.Example programsto get you started,running in your web browser!More consistent API naming conventions. Everything is named consistently across the API now, instead of different subsystems taking different approaches. Also, weve tended toward more descriptive names for things in SDL3.Main Callbacks: optionally run your program from callbacks instead of main().GPU API: access to modern 3D rendering and GPU compute in a cross-platform way.Dialog API: access to system file dialogs (file and folder selection UI for opening/saving).Filesystem API: simple directory management and globbing, access to topic-specific user folders.Storage API: Abstract interface to platform-specific storage.Camera API: access to webcams.Pen API: access to pens (like Wacom tablets and Apple Pencil, etc).Logical audio devices: different parts of an app can get their own unique audio device to use.Audio streams: handle buffering, converting, resampling, mixing, channel mapping, pitch, and gain. Bind to an audio device and go!Default audio devices: SDL3 will automatically manage migrating to new physical hardware as devices are plugged in, ripped out, or changed.Properties API: fast, flexible dictionaries of name/value pairs.Process API: Spawn child processes and communicate with them in various ways.Colorspace support: Surfaces and the renderer, etc, can manage multiple colorspaces.The Clipboard APIcan support any data type(SDL2 only handled text), and apps can provide data in multiple formats upon request ina provided callback.Better keyboard input, for all your keypress needs.Customizable virtual keyboardson iOS and Android.High DPI support is dramatically improved over SDL2.App metadata APIfor letting SDL report things about your app correctly (like in the About dialog on macOS, etc).and much, much more.If you are migrating from SDL 2 be sure to check out the migration guide linked below. Key LinksSDL 3.2.0 Release DetailsSDL HomepageSDL 3 Language BindingsSDL 3 Migration GuideSteam Games using SDLYou can learn more about the Simple DirectMedia Layer game development framework as well as the SDL 3 (technically 3.2.0) release in the video below.