🥇First release of the LDL multimedia library with support for older systems

I present to you the first version of the multimedia library developed by me Little DirectMedia Layer, abbreviated as LDL.

The library is written in C++98 standard, allowing it to be compiled starting from Visual C++ 6.0. The code is distributed under the terms of the Boost Software License 1.0. However, the library does not limit programmers in their choice of C++ language standard; they can use any modern standard. I adhere to the philosophy of downgrade—this is the use of old devices and software in everyday life, when companies no longer support their own ‘obsolete’ operating systems or devices, increasing system requirements with every new version of their products, or stopping support for the device altogether. Billions of devices around the world process billions of instructions of unoptimized code every second.

This year, I presented at the C++ 2023 conference with a talk ‘Back to the Future, or Developing a Framework for Windows 95 in 2023’.

With my project, I want to prove that old hardware can still be useful and that it's too early to discard it. There’s something enchanting about old technologies, approaches, and devices, and it’s also a challenge to new libraries and programs.

At the very beginning of the development process, I didn’t even imagine that this library was possible at all. But in the practical implementation of the prototype, adding line by line to the foundation of the future library, I became convinced of its feasibility and practical application.

In summary, it is possible to write fast programs; you just need to leverage the knowledge of the ancients.

Library capabilities:

support for Linux Debian 3 and above (native build provided);
support for Windows 95 to Windows 11;
simple API for working with 2D graphics;
loading multiple graphic formats (bmp, png, tga, jpg);
cross-platform API over OS windows and events;
for hardware acceleration of graphics, OpenGL 1.2 and
OpenGL 3.3 are used, with support for CPU-only graphics processing if hardware acceleration is absent;
the renderer can be dynamically selected when loading the application;
a unified API for all systems—write once and compile everywhere!
audio playback;
dynamic and static linking.

Future plans: