metal-cpp VS vulkan-guide

My understanding is the proliferation of “XYZ-cpp” AI frameworks is due to the c++ support in Apple’s gpu library ‘Metal’, and the popularity of apple silicon for inference (and there are a few technical reasons for this): https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/

This is basically also what the "official" C++ API for Metal does (https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/), it's an automatically generated bindings wrapper which calls into ObjC runtime functions.

I also dabbled a bit with this idea by parsing clang AST-dumps of macOS system headers:

https://github.com/floooh/objc-ast-experiments

Unfortunately this is very brittle, and also broke on ARM CPUs, I guess the shim code needs some ABI adjustments (famously, objc_msgSend has multiple "ABI shapes": https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/objc_msgsends-new-prototype.h...).

There's official C++-interface: https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/

It doesn't matter if the project driven by Microsoft or not, the cat (of automatically generated language bindings) is out of the bag. E.g. Zig is using the same approach without being an official MS project: https://github.com/marlersoft/zigwin32, and Apple has an automatically generated C++ API for Metal (https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/).

In the future, the question won't be "what language do I need to learn to code on this platform", but instead "are there language bindings for my favourite language".

this? https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/

Doesn't it just use objc/runtime.h and if anything is missing you can just add your custom api calls?

Metal has C++ bindings (which cover a full app lifecycle so you don’t have to touch Objective-C/Swift at all) but they’re based on the Objective-C memory model. There are some helper structs mimicking shared pointers, but you’ll still need to understand the basics of how an autorelease pool is used to avoid memory leaks and/or bad access crashes.

On https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/ check Foundation folder and all those nice Object::sendMessage().

I totally agree, and so do the people working on it as well as some of the volunteers who write tutorials.

There's an ongoing effort to create beginner friendly introductory material which was discussed in the recent Vulkanised conference. And an effort to make a better documentation site that's easier to browse than the specification.

On the volunteer front, there's a Vulkan 1.3 -based introductory tutorial (work in progress) over at https://vkguide.dev/

I think there should be a Vulkan tutorial that doesn't start with the boring stuff of initialization and window creation. It's stuff that you write once and forget about, and nothing particularly interesting happens in it.

Looking at my hobby project, excluding the boring stuff (which is reusable), a "hello compute" example is around 100 LOC and a "hello triangle" around 120 LOC. GLSL shader sources included.

Maybe someday I'll get around to writing a "learn Vulkan the hard way" blog post with examples.

Also, use https://vkguide.dev/ rather than vulkan-tutorial.

Once you're beyond the "introductory" phase, resources become more specialized based on what you'd like to learn -- there are Vulkan tutorials like https://vkguide.dev/ which will teach you the API and also give a bit more insight in how modern GPU hardware is structured, there are books like the "GPU Zen" series that do deep-dives on specific techniques, and there are tons of recorded GDC and SIGGRAPH talks on interesting new techniques. :)

Personally, I'm a hands on learner who actually wants to use this stuff in my career, so I'd recommend these tutorials: https://learnopengl.com/ https://vulkan-tutorial.com/Overview https://vkguide.dev/

vkguide teaches some good practices regarding code/renderer structure, but I'm afraid it doesn't go as deep as you'd like. It's certainly deeper than most other tutorials, though.

https://vkguide.dev/ This is my favorite.