wgpu-native VS cross

The Mach engine project has prebuilt Dawn libraries and also a simplified build-from-source process using the Zig build system, see:

https://machengine.org/pkg/mach-gpu-dawn/

It's also possible to use wgpu-native in C/C++ projects as prebuilt library, see:

https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-native

It is based on the wgpu-native implementation (Firefox backend) but I plan on adding a receipe for using it with Dawn (Chrome backend) as well.

go-webgpu provides binding for wgpu-native (a safe and portable GPU abstraction in Rust, implementing WebGPU API).

Rust, C++

When you look at graphics APIs in Rust practically everything is pointing towards, and telling you to use, wgpu, which abstracts over Vulkan, Metal, DX11/12, GLES and WebGPU and is based on, drumroll, WebGPU. Hardly surprising as it's the backend firefox is going to use. And yes it has a C API, too.

Probably the easiest option would be to target wgpu-native prebuilt binaries but these don't have iOS/Android (unsure if wgpu-native supports iOS/Android at all)

WGPU is the underlying implementation for WebGPU in Firefox and it has C bindings: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu-native.git.

To compile a program with musl on a glibc system you can use cross-rs!

I cross compile to Mac, bsd, windows, etc cross ... Works great for me with either docker or podman.

If docker is available for you, https://github.com/cross-rs/cross is another and reliable way to solve this kind of problem. I do use it regularly.

We are using https://github.com/cross-rs/cross.

There is some built-in support in rustc for cross-compiling, but getting the build to actually work can be tricky due to the need for an appropriate linker. Instead, we’re going to use the Cross crate, which used to be maintained by the Rust Embedded Working Group Tools group.

I have used cross before to cross compile from Linux to other Linux. It has a section on it's wiki about this. Maybe that could be of help.

You can use cross to build your application and copy the artifacts into an alpine armv7 container. It would also build faster due to using cross compilation rather than QEMU.

Looks like cross is the easiest way to get something cross-compiled but its Mac support is blocked behind building your own build image. Even that repo says that it might be broken.

Bonus: if you’re working with Rust and doing a lot of cross platform stuff, check out cross. It runs QEMU in docker so you can run tests on a bunch of different emulated targets easily- literally a one line setup, it’s kind of magical.

It's also not as naturally cross-compilable as Go, though that's partly a side-effect of not accepting being a semi-closed ecosystem to achieve that and cross exists as a stop-gap while things like cargo-zigbuild explore less drastic options.