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by cardanome 428 days ago
What exactly is your background? MY first idea was that you might be very young but your account is from 2010.

Not knowing SDL feels like someone having no idea what C++ or Unreal Engine is. I am curious how you managed to avoid learning about SDL despite being on hacker news.
3 comments
cortesoft 428 days ago
I don't know what to say other than I am pretty sure I have never encountered it before. I have been coding for over 30 years, 20 years professionally, and have never seen it. You can see by my account age and comment history that I have been active on HN for 15 years.

I actually have interest in game programming, too. So I don't know.

I am sure I'll encounter it 10 times this week now, good old Baeder-Meinhoff

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cardanome 428 days ago
Oh you absolutely will. I guarantee you, you have used a lot of software that is using SDL.

https://steamdb.info/tech/SDK/SDL/

Though to be fair it kind of makes sense that you would have never used SDL yourself. It you never go that far down the stack and do stuff like write your own game engine and the like, you wouldn't really need to know it. I guess I am more aware of software dependencies as a Linux user? That is my only explanation or maybe you are really just one of those lucky 10000.

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bigstrat2003 428 days ago
> Not knowing SDL feels like someone having no idea what C++ or Unreal Engine is.

I've literally never even heard the term SDL before this. I would say that it's nowhere near the same class of ubiquity as the other two examples you gave.

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cardanome 428 days ago
There are far more games written in SDL than in Unreal Engine.

Granted that is trivially true because Unreal Engine itself and many, many other engines use SDL internally but still. So yeah, is is way MORE ubiquitous than Unreal Engine.

I guess there is just less awareness because SDL is a lower level detail that most people don't really need to care about. It just works and powers a huge chunk of our games and software.

Nothing wrong with not knowing about it, it is just interesting to me that even in tech spaces some people are not aware of SDL. I am sure there is a lot of things I don't know either.

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Wowfunhappy 427 days ago
https://xkcd.com/1053/ seems relevant here. :)
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