glbinding VS VulkanExamples

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

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