SDL3 -> pygame-ce 3.0?

[oddbookworm]

Should we move to a new major version when SDL3 is released and we update to that version?

[raytopianprojects]

I think it'd be awesome! Especially if it means getting access to SDL3's new shaders.

[Starbuck5]

On discord, I frequently assert that we are more than "just" a wrapper, and our versioning, including major versions, is free to be completely independent of SDL releasing.

However, a 3.0 for SDL3 could work nicely.

The problem with a major release is that while we would want to make some breaking changes, we don't have the market share to effectively do so.

[JiffyRob]

As a pygame user, I really want to be able to mess with all the SDL3 stuff. GPU performance, native shaders, it looks really sweet (yes I know at least some of this can be achieved using the pygame._sdl2 module, but it would be real nice to not have to screw with an experimental API). My vote is for a compatibility layer, like SDL2 has for SDL1, probably in use by default.

Another thing to look at is how upstream pygame will deal with this. A lot of the users of pygame are teachers and students, and complicating things with Renderers and Textures and stuff probably won't go down well (this is another reason for an easy to access compat layer on our side). Especially since there aren't a lot of devs over there, I predict very few breaking changes.

That said, we don't know when SDL3 will come out, we don't know how upstream plans to deal with it, and so I would wait until we have more to go off of.

[PurityLake]

It would certainly be a very cool thing to consider, iirc there is a compatibility layer available in SDL3 to provide SDL2 behaviour so it may be possible to provide access to both.

sdl2-compat

[Starbuck5]

SDL2 compat would only be useful for us if we wanted to ship an SDL3 runtime without compiling against SDL3. Since we're going to want to use SDL3 features and manage 2->3 compatibility ourselves we will need to put lots of effort into the code so it can compile on SDL2 or SDL3. When pygame upgraded to SDL2 this was the strategy. In fact, several releases of pygame 2.0 could still compile against SDL1.

Responding to JiffyRob's comment as well, we don't need a compatibility layer to access Surfaces in SDL3, just like we don't need that for SDL2.