Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3

I recently converted a game, Tribal Trouble (https://github.com/bondolo/tribaltrouble) from GLFW to SDL3. It was mostly a painless refactor though I did have some issues with full screen exclusive modes and desktop full screen but was eventually able to resolve those.

I ended writing a demo for screen mode handling to test and document the fiddly bits.

https://github.com/bondolo/SDL3-Fullscreen-Demo

The game is Java, like Minecraft, the demo is C because I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.

The lwjgl bindings for this were written by a member of the GTNH modpack team, thereby completing the chain of vanilla->modded->vanilla once more https://github.com/LWJGL/lwjgl3/pull/1033

> Known Issues

> Exclusive fullscreen mode on Windows may cause the game to crash in certain situations, especially when using multiple monitors

> Entering Exclusive fullscreen mode crashes the game on Wayland

Those, together, kinda seem like the kind of blocking bug that would usually delay a snapshot... Lets hoping it gets fixed before release lands...

Anyone got any advice for a techy dad with no (zero) Minecraft experience who wants to set up a Minecraft server for the family in 2026? Kids right now are playing on their iPads, and (sometimes) old macbooks/windows PCs.

Icculus has some great videos of porting games from SDL2 to 3, here's the one porting Doom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixdeGhsoxy8

It's really amazing how much Minecraft is becoming more and more a game engine on it's own rather than just a game.

Is the rationale for switching away from GLFW documented anywhere? I'd love to read about it, I have some projects which use GLFW myself and I'm always wondering whether or not SDL would be better

osu (the rhythm game) also recently switched to SDL3, from SDL2, and it came with significant performance/latency improvements. SDL3 adoption is a bit slow it seems. Though, I'm surprised Minecraft used GLFW all this time.

One notable thing is that switching to SDL3 eliminated lag from having Discord client open while playing osu. Pretty sure this was from their devlog on YouTube.

SDL3 switch makes sense given how much SDL2 was showing its age around GPU API abstraction (Vulkan/Metal support especially). Curious if this fixes any of the longstanding input lag / alt-tab issues that Java Edition has had on Linux, since that's usually where the windowing/input layer causes the most pain.

SDL always had a great API design, but in SDL3... Goddamnn!

Honestly, it seems like the way to go to have a very moddable game is a language that's easily decompiled and modified at runtime like Java or C# (or just JVM and .NET CLR if you prefer).

When they do internal modifications, but also have modders in mind, you get to have an amazing modding API basically "for free".

> Entering Exclusive fullscreen mode crashes the game on Wayland

Pretty good for Wayland.

Luanti is the answer

I'm teaching my son python programming.

Anyone with experience on programming Minecraft with python? Tips?

> Armadillos no longer try to roll up when submerged in liquids

This sounds hilarious out of the context :D

With the regressions this reads like an april fools post...

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I honestly went and read those release notes just to check if they're using this transition as an excuse to make the game less cross platform.

They still update that? I thought it's all bedrock now?

I kind of don't see the benefit, as it's still going to use only the window, input and platform integrations features, while SDL3 has a whole software renderer built-in and much more.