I tested on Windows natively (in a shell) and on Linux (in WSL) and it works for me in both.

This looks fine, but it did work when using pixi run right?

Yes, the main works with pixi run start.

Also this PR needs to be tested on macOS, the static linking might not work there.

Thanks @certik, assigned our Mac users to test it, if they approve we can merge it!

Although its nice to run it without pixi r start, is this something we want to use as an example as not all libraries have static counterparts on conda.

Is there a way on Windows to make the program just work by finding the "dll" libraries automatically? Or is static linking the only option?

On Linux and macOS you can use rpath that seems to work pretty well, alleviating most issues with shared libraries.

I dont think there is something like rpath, but if the dlls are next to the executable that would work.

Is this ready to merge?

I've been using SDL in a project for some time with pixi, and I had problems with static linking on all platforms.

I personally think static linking is preferable for end user applications, especially on Windows where the habit seems to be to simply pack all dlls and ship them with the application. So the dlls are not reused anyway, so might as well just link it statically.

However, given the linking problems I had, I would recommend to stick with dynamic linking for now, since this is a demo and must work on all platforms out of the box. So I am going to close the PR.