[SDL] Poll: Atomic Operations?

[Nathaniel J Fries]

Bob wrote:
> I got what I really wanted
> out of doing the project which was a serious update to my knowledge of
> atomic operations and a nice review of atomic op based thread
> programming.

This is my only argument for keeping. SDL already provides threading support, why not provide userspace synchronization techniques as well?
That said, the only two things that SDL would really need to implement are spinlocks and __maybe__ (it's simple enough to implement this one on one's own) a spin-x-times lock wrapping a system mutex (which, from my understanding, is essentially the same as Window's CRITICALSECTION and Linux's futex).


> That lack of people stepping up is a major vote against
> keeping the library in the core of SDL.
> 
> The fact that there were so few responses to Sam's query shows how
> little interest their is in the API. Little interest == few people
> stepping up.

agreed, but not really a reason to completely drop the code so much as to make it a side project that is not SDL core


> 1) a Simple Direct abstraction for accessing multimedia capabilities
> of a computing platform. I think this view includes the idea of
> including a nice set of convenience functions that handle the kinds of
> things you need to do to resources to get them ready for use on a
> given platform. Things like reading, writing, reformatting,
> compositing, scaling, sampling.... But, limited to handling just the
> multimedia parts of the job.

Well, this IS the implication of SDL's name... Simple Direct Media (abstraction) Layer.


> 2) A complete abstraction of the platform that lets you write code
> once and compile and run it anywhere. The APIs that are offered are
> the common subset of what each platform can do

This is what SDL + most of its companion libraries are.


> [...] PLUS a set of query
> functions and compile time definitions so that your application can
> adjust to the realities of the platform it is running on PLUS a
> minimal set of platform specific APIs that are necessary to make
> applications work on specific platforms. Ideally this could be
> #ifdef'ed so that code will still compile and run on any platform.

Well, I personally would like to see some functions providing non-common-denominator functionality on systems supporting it.
For example, how much better would the iPhone port be if it also provided a C layer over the UIKit views, and of course functions to integrate those with windows.


> One of the nicest things about SDL is that it is possible to write
> good games using *just* SDL. Having a single library to start with is
> more important for learning than people seem to believe. You can learn
> all the concepts working with a single library and a single set of
> documentation. [...] The
> value of having a single point of contact with all the concepts, the
> documentation, and a community is immense.

Agreed. SDL is what really enabled me to play around with game development for the first time.

------------------------
EM3 Nathaniel Fries, U.S. Navy

http://natefries.net/




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