wgpu-native VS learn-wgpu

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.

Nice.

Speaking of Snake game, if you want to go even deeper, you can try to use the wgpu crate to combine Rust and WebGPU to write everything from scratch. Here is the tutorial:

https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/#what-is-wgpu

I once wrote a code editor with wgpu, from font rendering to char/line state management (very rough) for music live coding:

https://github.com/glicol/glicol-wgpu

It runs in browsers, even including Safari!

https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/ This is probably the best resource out there for learning wgpu specifically. If you're unfamiliar with graphics, the learnopengl one is good. If you've got experience though, jumping right into that one is a shout or looking at some vulkan ones as they're pretty similar in terms of architecture.

- https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu

Most of The WGPU I learnt is from https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/ but it doesn't really talk about designing n stuff, I thought of checking out the source code for Bevy or even games like veloren. But well, their codebases are pretty big to get started in the first place.

So I was wondering if opting for option 1 would be better to begin with. OpenGL has a much bigger community and wgpu only has its documentation which I hear is not quite up there yet. There is this excellent tutorial for wgpu that I read through, but it seems like wgpu can be a lot more complicated than starting with OpenGL.

I started with wgpu tutorial (https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/) since I like the idea of portability and it's a Rust-first library, but it seems I'm missing some foundations of how CG works in general: the code is given, a little of explanation like it assumes I already know something, maybe I'm wrong, but I wish there was a longer explicit version.

If you haven't seen it: https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/ is a good introduction that will explain most of what you asked, then can refer to rend3d or bevys renderer to see how a render graph works.