VulkanExamples VS Open-Source Vulkan C++ API

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.11) project(my_project LANGUAGES CXX VERSION 1.0 ) include(FetchContent) FetchContent_Declare( glfw GIT_REPOSITORY "https://github.com/glfw/glfw" GIT_TAG dd8a678a66f1967372e5a5e3deac41ebf65ee127 ) message("Fetching glfw...") FetchContent_MakeAvailable(glfw) FetchContent_Declare( vulkan GIT_REPOSITORY "https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Hpp" GIT_TAG 429c4c522c65d10ec6df4633a1b78fc28aca7dc3 ) message("Fetching vulkan") FetchContent_MakeAvailable(vulkan) add_executable(my_project src/main.cpp) target_link_libraries(my_project PRIVATE glfw) target_link_libraries(my_project PRIVATE vulkan)

The second sample comes from NVIDIA. It shows a transcoded version of the API sample, High Dynamic Range, and illustrated the usage of the C++ binding of Vulkan provided by Vulkan.hpp. Sample - https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Samples/tree/master/samples/api/hpp_hdr Vulkan.hpp - https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Hpp

or https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Hpp which help quite a bit. Or https://github.com/VcDevel/std-simd.

If you want GUIs, same, you have at least (but not only) Qt or WxWidgets.

Want to interface scripting? Pybind11, Boost.Python, WrenBind17 for Wren, Sol2 for Lua... and all things that interface to C work also if you feel brave...

I really think that when it is about getting the job done... C++ goes a long way towards the task.

This is my 20 year experience of C++, almost 13 of those years professionally. Now, back to read the paper. :)

If you're not a complete beginner, the vulkan.hpp version of Sascha Willems' samples is out of date, you could contribute some updated examples. You'd get a decent overview of various Vulkan features and become familiar with both the C and C++ APIs.

I don't have a cheat sheet but I do have a repository with a bunch of examples that use the C++ api https://github.com/jherico/vulkan

It might be useful to maybe look at the Vulkan.hpp examples since you can do the same in about 200 lines of code. https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Hpp/blob/main/samples/15_DrawCube/15_DrawCube.cpp

Wow that library looks amazing, I'll definitely be using it. Bonus that it's official from the Khronos Group. https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Hpp

Even auto-generated c++ wrappers like vulkan-hpp require lots of manual maintenance.

Ultimately I went with vulkan.hpp RAII bindings, even though that way also has some learning curve and I couldn't find any documentation other than the RAII programming guide. It's great for getting started, but could use a complementary auto-generated API doc. There are also decent programming samples, which really suck for getting started, but otherwise do a good job of presenting concepts they focus on. Putting the available resources together I was able to get a project going in two weekends.

This is exactly how the official Vulkan C++ API, Vulkan-Hpp does it. For the precise example mentioned in the blog post:

Or the vulkan.hpp RAII samples would be a good place?

For a real-life example: consider the vk::raii namespace of Vulkan-Hpp, where the developers have posted examples. The vk::raii::su namespace has a bunch of free functions that one might think are associated with a Vulkan instance/object (in fact, the Vulkan Tutorial does implement them as member functions), but they are much nicer when used as pure functions. It keeps the class/struct definition itself nice and clean.

final c++17 draft (N4659) first post-publication draft after c++20 (N4868) vulkan-structs.hpp (containing the vk::ImageCreateInfo definition) VkImageCreateInfo struct