Awesome

SDLAda

This is a new variable thickness Ada 2012 binding to SDL 2.x.y (http://www.libsdl.org). This means that things are wrapped when they need to be into a thicker binding and those things that can just be imported, are.

There will still be a need to use conditional compilation for the various platforms as there will be some platform specifics which cannot be abstracted out cleanly, but this will be reduced as much as possible.

The bindings are only generated for the specific parts of SDL which Ada does not already have support for, i.e. threads are not bound as Ada has tasking support built in.

Usage, Licence & Attribution

SDLAda is distributed under the same zlib licence as the SDL library is. You may use this library in any way you like whether free or commercial. I would add that whilst you don't have to state that your game uses this library, it would be nice if you did, it's all good advertising for Ada :)

You do not need to complete any copyright assignment forms, the licence will not change from zlib as I want people to be able to use the library however they wish without restrictions.

Building

Makefile

This was originally built with the idea that there could be different compilers and their build scripts would go into a build/<compiler> directory. This can still be built with the makefile, the subsequent extracted components cannot.

There are a number of variables which can be set to control the compilation:

• SDL_PLATFORM = Can be set to one of the following values: linux, windows, macosx, macos_homebrew, ios or android
• SDL_MODE = Can be one of: debug or release. Defaults to debug.

cd build/gnat
make SDL_PLATFORM=linux SDL_MODE=release

Alire

You can build the library with Alire now, by calling the following in the root directory:

alr build

This seems to have come up as an issue, people not checking the original makefile on lines 29 and 93 on how to link SDLAda. SDL2 comes with the sdl2-config command which includes the following options:

$ sdl2-config --help
Usage: /usr/bin/sdl2-config [--prefix[=DIR]] [--exec-prefix[=DIR]] [--version] [--cflags] [--libs]

$ sdl2-config --cflags
-I/usr/include/SDL2 -D_REENTRANT

$ sdl2-config --libs
-L/usr/lib64 -lSDL2

These options will differ depending on operating system. SDL3 seems like it might operate in a bit more of a portable way.

Linking

To link an application with sdlada, you will need to add -largs $(sdl2-config --libs) to command line:

$ cd <game|app dir>
$ alr build -- -largs $(sdl2-config --libs)

You'll also need to add -lSDL2_image, -lSDL2_ttf and -lSDL2_mixer for your platform. TODO: Fix this.

This will only be required for the time being.

MacOS

SDLAda's alire.toml is set up to use the Homebrew and MacPorts distributions, so you need to install the dependencies first.

Home Brew

brew install sdl2
brew install sdl2_ttf
brew install sdl2_image
brew install sdl2_mixer

Mac Ports

sudo port install libsdl2
sudo port install libsdl2_ttf
sudo port install libsdl2_image
sudo port install libsdl2_mixer

Installation

make SDL_PLATFORM=linux SDL_MODE=release DESTDIR=$HOME/opt/sdlada install

Examples

You can find more examples hosted on Rosetta Code.

Screenshots

Copyright notice

See LICENCE file.

Thanks to

To everyone who has provided patches, pull requests, typo fixes, etc.

WARNING!!!

I have tried to model the types correctly, but remember SDL is a C library and some things may not make sense. Please file a bug report if you use this library and find that a type does not cover enough values for cross-platform use.

TODO

Anything listed here is a question of whether it's required.

• Do we need to hook into the Assert module? To raise an exception maybe?
• Create event tagged type hierarchy, use Poll to convert the C events into these types.
• Task safe event handling?
• Split Image, TTF into separate GPR files.
• Cross platform testing.
• Optimisations to make the library as thin as possible:
  • Enable -gnatN for inlining.
  • Try to get as much pre-elaborated as possible.
• Disable a shared library build, make it a static only build, this makes it easier to distribute. i.e. Link with this library and distribute SDL2 libs only.
• Hide the RWops stuff maybe? Should really be using Ada streams and files.

Current version

See alire.toml

Versions tested against

Status

SDL Core

Init / Shutdown

Configuration Variables

Error Handling

Log Handling

Assertions

Querying SDL Version

Display and Window Management

2D Accelerated Rendering

Pixel Formats and Conversion Routines

Rectangle Functions

Surface Creation and Simple Drawing

Platform-specific Window Management

Clipboard Handling

Vulkan Support

Metal Support

Event Handling

Keyboard Support

Mouse Support

Joystick Support

Game Controller Support

Touch & Gesture

Sensors

Force Feedback Support

Audio Device Management, Playing and Recording

Thread Management

Thread Synchronization Primitives

Atomic Operations

Timer Support

Filesystem Paths

File I/O Abstraction

Shared Object Loading and Function Lookup

Platform Detection

CPU Feature Detection

Byte Order and Byte Swapping

Bit Manipulation

Power Management Status

Message boxes

Platform-specific Functionality

Standard Library Functionality

SDL_image

SDL_ttf