ash VS Open-Source Vulkan C++ API

If you want to automate the creation of certain code that will be nested under the src directory, and committed into source control, there are a variety of ways to do that. One option is to create a sub-crate in your project that does the code-gen and you can run it as needed. The ash project is an example of this.

There is also [Vulkano](https://github.com/vulkano-rs/vulkano). It has a safe high level api and lower level layers, all the way down to [ash](https://github.com/ash-rs/ash) which is more or less raw vulkan. It's more explicit and verbose than [wgpu](https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu) though, so maybe try wgpu first and see how you like it.

Yes. I use Ash bindings for Vulkan and raw GLSL for shaders. I tried to use spirv-std for shaders—it was really great to have the benefits of Rust (structs, enums, strict type assertions, etc.)—until I needed to use buffer references. Unfortunaly, it is not yet implemented.

This is great, of all the vulkan go bindings I have been waiting for one that uses vk.xml to generate the bindings, because it's the only viable way to keep the bindings up-to-date. (fyi the popular [ash-rs](https://github.com/ash-rs/ash) is created the same-way).

Hi, I am having an issue on pop-os wayland where when I run a vulkan application I get an error symbol lookup error: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnvidia-vulkan-producer.so: undefined symbol: wlEglCreateSurfaceExport I have tested this with https://github.com/ash-rs/ash running the triangle example.

Nice and simple. Its quite portable too. But simplicity and ease of use come with some limitations. Ash is much more complex but can extract every bit of power from your card if needed. Wgpu-rs github comes with many examples and you can find a really nice tutorial here

low level vulkan bindings

Glium and ash provide low level access to different common graphics api's. I'm sure there's a good directx-11/12 bindings as well but I'm unfamiliar with what people use.

fn read_uncompressed_buffer( reader: &mut R, length: usize, // estimated via a seek or other mechanism file_is_little_endian: bool, ) -> Result> { let bytes = length * std::mem::size_of::(); // it is undefined behavior to call read_exact on un-initialized, https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/io/trait.Read.html#tymethod.read // see also https://github.com/MaikKlein/ash/issues/354#issue-781730580 let mut buffer = vec![0u64, length]; unsafe { // transmute u64 to bytes. let slice = std::slice::from_raw_parts_mut( buffer.as_mut_ptr() as *mut u8, length * std::mem::size_of::(), ); reader.read_exact(slice)?; } if is_native_little_endian() != file_is_little_endian { swap(&mut buffer, file_is_little_endian) } }

// it is undefined behavior to call read_exact on un-initialized, https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/io/trait.Read.html#tymethod.read // see also https://github.com/MaikKlein/ash/issues/354#issue-781730580 let mut buffer = vec![0u64, length]; unsafe { // transmute u64 to bytes. let slice = std::slice::from_raw_parts_mut( buffer.as_mut_ptr() as *mut u8, length * std::mem::size_of::(), ); reader.read_exact(slice)?; } if is_native_little_endian() != file_is_little_endian { swap(&mut buffer, file_is_little_endian) }

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