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

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

MacOS

SDLAda#s alire.toml is set up to use the Homebrew libs, so you need to install those first.

brew install sdl2
brew install sdl2_ttf
brew install sdl2_image

Installation

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

Examples

You can find more examples hosted on Rosetta Code.

Copyright

Copyright (C) 2013-2020, Luke A. Guest

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

v2.5.4

Versions tested against

Bound functions

SDL

SDL_image

SDL_ttf