SDL window size, state, and position functions have been considered immediate, with their effects assuming to have taken effect upon successful return of the function. However, several windowing systems handle these requests asynchronously, resulting in the functions blocking until the changes have taken effect, potentially for long periods of time. Additionally, some windowing systems treat these as requests, and can potentially deny or fulfill the request in a manner differently than the application expects, such as not allowing a window to be positioned or sized beyond desktop borders, prohibiting fullscreen, and so on.
With these changes, applications can make requests of the window manager that do not block, with the understanding that an associated event will be sent if the request is fulfilled. Currently, size, position, maximize, minimize, and fullscreen calls are handled as asynchronous requests, with events being returned if the request is honored. If the application requires that the change take effect immediately, it can call the new SDL_SyncWindow function, which will attempt to block until the request is fulfilled, or some arbitrary timeout period elapses, the duration of which depends not only on the windowing system, but on the operation requested as well (e.g. a 100ms timeout is fine for most X11 events, but maximizing a window can take considerably longer for some reason). There is also a new hint 'SDL_VIDEO_SYNC_ALL_WINDOW_OPS' that will mimic the old behavior by synchronizing after every window operation with, again, the understanding that using this may result in the associated calls blocking for a relatively long period.
The deferred model also results in the window size and position getters not reporting false coordinates anymore, as they only forward what the window manager reports vs allowing applications to set arbitrary values, and fullscreen enter/leave events that were initiated via the window manager update the window state appropriately, where they didn't before.
Care was taken to ensure that order of operations is maintained, and that requests are not ignored or dropped. This does require some implicit internal synchronization in the various backends if many requests are made in a short period, as some state and behavior depends on other bits of state that need to be known at that particular point in time, but this isn't something that typical applications will hit, unless they are sending a lot of window state in a short time as the tests do.
The automated tests developed to test the previous behavior also resulted in previously undefined behavior being defined and normalized across platforms, particularly when it comes to the sizing and positioning of windows when they are in a fixed-size state, such as maximized or fullscreen. Size and position requests made when the window is not in a movable or resizable state will be deferred until it can be applied, so no requests are lost. These changes fix another long-standing issue with renderers recreating maximized windows, where the original non-maximized size was lost, resulting in the window being restored to the wrong size. All automated video tests pass across all platforms.
Overall, the "make a request/get an event" model better reflects how most windowing systems work, and some backends avoid spending significant time blocking while waiting for operations to complete.
warning C6340: Mismatch on sign: 'int' passed as _Param_(4) when some unsigned type is required in call to 'SDL_snprintf_REAL'.
warning C6340: Mismatch on sign: 'const unsigned char' passed as _Param_(4) when some signed type is required in call to 'SDL_snprintf_REAL'.
warning C26451: Arithmetic overflow: Using operator '*' on a 4 byte value and then casting the result to a 8 byte value. Cast the value to the wider type before calling operator '*' to avoid overflow (io.2).
warning C6340: Mismatch on sign: 'int' passed as _Param_(4) when some unsigned type is required in call to 'SDL_snprintf_REAL'.
warning C6001: Using uninitialized memory 'devName'.
warning C6340: Mismatch on sign: 'unsigned char' passed as _Param_(4) when some signed type is required in call to 'SDL_snprintf_REAL'.
warning C6221: Implicit cast between semantically different integer types: comparing HRESULT to an integer. Consider using SUCCEEDED or FAILED macros instead.
warning C28251: Inconsistent annotation for 'SDL_vsscanf_REAL': this instance has no annotations. See c:\projects\sdl-experimental\include\sdl3\sdl_stdinc.h(597).
warning C28252: Inconsistent annotation for 'SDL_vsnprintf_REAL': _Param_(3) has 'SAL_IsFormatString("printf")' on the prior instance. See c:\projects\sdl-experimental\include\sdl3\sdl_stdinc.h(600).
warning C28253: Inconsistent annotation for 'SDL_vswprintf_REAL': _Param_(3) has 'SAL_IsFormatString("printf")' on this instance. See c:\projects\sdl-experimental\include\sdl3\sdl_stdinc.h(601).
warning C28251: Inconsistent annotation for 'SDL_vasprintf_REAL': this instance has no annotations. See c:\projects\sdl-experimental\include\sdl3\sdl_stdinc.h(603).
Also fixed warning C6239: (<non-zero constant> && <expression>) always evaluates to the result of <expression>. Did you intend to use the bitwise-and operator?
Sam Lantinga
Anonymous Maarten
SDL Wiki Bot
Frank Praznik
Ozkan Sezer