cacao VS MoltenVK

This is really specific, but for this point in the article:

> There’s a long guide on Embedding a Command-Line Tool in a Sandboxed App, so I followed that, and then slowly, painfully, factored Xcode out of it, so that I wouldn’t have to figure out how to get a 10GB Xcode install onto the CI machine (remember, you need to be signed in to an Apple ID to download Xcode, and there’s no way to do it from the command-line).

You could actually solve this with Rust and no Xcode whatsoever. cacao [1] and cargo-bundle [2] will produce an app bundle you could sign/notarize/distribute without needing to ever open Xcode.

[1] https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/cacao

I've had basic animation support in cacao for about a year now, but I don't think anybody even realizes it.

But I will reiterate what I say on many posts like these, which is that it would be even cooler if we could stop having a million projects reinvent this wheel - and I say this as someone who wrote a large Rust library that is backed by ObjC. madsmtm has an ongoing effort to put together a best in class ObjC Rust wrapper, which would be great to see even more support for.

MacOS; I have to call the AppKit API. I can use a library like this which offers Rust bindings for AppKit - otherwise I can write my own maybe?

Yes, you can: https://github.com/ryanmcgrath/cacao

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

Translating between rendering APIs is not really the problem. The GPU design is more different than the API is.

Khronos maintains MoltenVk though, which is "official" as it gets: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

...technically, Vulkan on Windows is also only supported via 3rd-parties (the GPU vendors), Microsoft doesn't support Vulkan either ;)

MoltenVK implements large parts of Vulkan on top of Metal for Apple systems. It isn't full Vulkan but it makes porting Vulkan games to OS X easier.

That's cool. Maybe I haven't thought enough about this. Let me check it out. FWIW it's this PR that you are referring to I think: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/pull/1815/

For Metal specifically, they could adopt and contribute to Vulkan and get access to a lot more software. Right now you need to use a compatibility layer, and surely Apple could just support both APIs natively with much lower overhead. But they don't, because it nudges developers to stick to the Apple ecosystem instead of being able to support multiple platforms.

At the moment the most promising thing is MoltenVK (DX12 -> DXVK -> Vulkan -> MoltenVK -> Metal), but the development is not that quick mainly because there aren't tons of developer that works at the same time on the project. It's not actually a Metal related problem at the moment (they have a road map of things that they can be achieved with Metal 3 like Mesh shader and Geometry shader).

What you asked is already existed for at least 8 years. Yeah EIGHT years. It's called "MoltenVK". So far it's the only implementation of Vulkan for macOS. Basically it's a wrapper that runs on top of Metal API.