Actually, this is needed for building with Visual Studio with both /MT and /MD. With the previous change, I get: 1> Creating library C:\projects\SDL\VisualC\Win32\Debug\SDL2.lib and object C:\projects\SDL\VisualC\Win32\Debug\SDL2.exp 1>LINK : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol __DllMainCRTStartup@12