Folks, we have climbed the mountain.
SDL3 is official! After 17 bazillion years, there is a real, honest-to-god stable release.
So as to be completely confusing, it's version 3.2.0. This actually makes sense, but I won't bore you with the details, because your time is better spent digging in and building awesome things with it!
The release itself is here.
A list of the big new features is available.
There's video tutorial where I port ioquake3 from SDL2 to SDL3 over on YouTube.
I did the same with DirkSimple and enabled some new SDL3 features in a sequel video.
We have the cutest little example programs, where you can even see them running in your web browser at examples.libsdl.org.
We have a LOT of documentation. TONS. Every symbol in SDL3 is documented. You can read it in the headers in doxygen format, or you can read it on the wiki, where we turn the headers into pretty HTML (for fun, wiki edits go right back into the headers too!). Don't know what SDL_CreateWindow does? Just read the wiki page. Any symbol you punch in will work!
Don't have internet access on-the-go but crave more wikiness in your life? We can help. Here's the entire wiki as standalone HTML files. Unzip and point your web browser at the files.
There is, of course, a Quick Reference, if you want to keep things super-casual.
Is that documentation not hardcore enough for you? How about Unix manpages? You can build these with the source code, or just grab the latest from that link, which updates on each commit.
Finally: if you haven't lost that lovin' feeling for SDL2, we have sdl2-compat, which provides you the SDL2 API but uses SDL3 behind the scenes. Get your game onto SDL3 without even recompiling it!
But for sdl2-compat to be really successful, we need an army of testers to pound on existing SDL2-based binaries with it, on Windows, Linux, and macOS. There's a massive set of SDL2 games out there. We have a document on how to test games, and a bug tracker when you hit problems. Gathering this data is something we can't do by ourselves, and it's super-useful, as one day, sdl2-compat will be the thing that people use instead of classic SDL2.
So go out there and do your patriotic duty by playing more games!
We're counting on you, soldier.