SDL was developed between 1998 and 2001 by Sam Lantinga, the chief programmer of the software company Loki Games. It should be a tool to convert successful Windows games to Linux. In 2002 the company got bankrupt though, but Lantinga went on developing SDL. So it got updated continuously  until today. In August 2013 the successor SDL2 has been released.

On January the 21st in 2025 SDL3 has been released and introduces a lot of new features which allow development of high performance applications using up-to-date technologies.

Although the original library isn’t written in Pascal, fortunately the SDL3 headers got translated to Pascal, so the SDL3 library is usable for Pascal developers as well.