vulkan-guide VS Open-Source Vulkan C++ API

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.

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