glbinding VS Open-Source Vulkan C++ API

Ever heard of https://glbinding.org ?

You should checkout glbinding, it might give you some ideas for your own wrapper.

I have based my career on top of C++/backend/soft-real time systems.

I still have to read the full paper, thanks for the post!

Many people rant about C++, but, IMHO, overall, taking into account ecosystem, tools, etc. C++ stands as an almost unbeatable technology when you put everything together. It has quirks, asymmetries and all of that.

But since C++11 it is nicer to use and all the standards after it have been improving on it: generic lambdas, structured bindings, string non-template parameters, constexpr and consteval... it is amazing what you can do with C++ that is difficult or almost impossible to do with other languages.

On the missing pieces I would mention that you need to use macros to have some kind of reflection for members and pattern matching and networking would be really nice to have.

Modules are still an experiment implementation-wise, but hey, they will improve on the side of hiding implementation details by a big margin.

As for the ecosystem, nowadays you have CMake (whose language sucks badly) and Meson. Together with Conan things have improved a lot since I started coding in around 2001.

Pack that with an IDE like CLion or Visual Studio + Resharper or lightweight IDE (Emacs + Lsp and the like) and you have an environment that is very competitive and whose code can be compiled almost anywhere. From ARM to x86, MIPS and even Webassembly.

That is why I think C++ is still the way to go if what you want is performance: you also have interfaces such as OpenCL/GL/Vulkan/SIMD libraries (though not C++ standard) where you can access hardware. Also, vendors and open source have things such as https://github.com/cginternals/glbinding

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