[ewmailing]

I didn't look at the demo, but that list of dependencies is not reflective of SDL.

This is what ldd on my build of SDL looks like:

    linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x00007ffda33d9000)
    libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007ff1e4c51000)
    libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007ff1e4a4d000)
    libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007ff1e4830000)
    librt.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librt.so.1 (0x00007ff1e4628000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007ff1e426a000)
    /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007ff1e527e000)

SDL on Linux does a lot of dlopen detection at launch because it is so hard to know what kind of Linux environment you are running in at compile time. For example, you may have a X11 server, or you may be running completely on the command line without any window server. (It's really cool being able to develop for Raspberry Pi Raspbian via SDL without X11 since RAM is so limited.)

So that list is not SDL's contribution and that demo was just linking to a lot of things, most of which look unnecessary (and sloppy, though this also makes a case why people want header-only libraries because many people don't want to think about this part). For example, why is a gui demo demo linking to FLAC and all the Ogg Vorbis libraries? SDL doesn't use or depend on these either.