wgpu VS glium

wgpu, the Rust WebGPU implementation is the bee's knees. https://wgpu.rs/ You can use it beyond the web.

There is anything like wgpu.rs for Zig? wgpu.rs is an abstraction on top of Vulkan, Metal, DirectX, etc...

dawn is the WebGPU backend in chromium, while wgpu is the WebGPU backend for firefox written in Rust. wgpu is seeing a lot of use in non-browser uses; there are some examples on their website.

https://wgpu.rs/

Funnily enough, we've never actually been on WebGL! The runtime's built against wgpu [0], which is an abstraction layer that supports the native rendering APIs, WebGPU, and yes, WebGL.

However, our renderer was built with native capabilities in mind (compute shaders!), so we would have had to rewrite it to support WebGL. We decided we'd keep up with WebGPU and see where it takes us :)

In the future, we may write a fallback renderer that's compatible with WebGL/older GPUs, but we wanted to focus on getting our existing renderer working first.

[0]: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu

The WGPU people have a new, faster version coming out and Firefox integration is in progress.[1]

[1] https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/pull/3626#issuecomment-173417...

I double checked, and our rendering library _does_ partially supports DX11, as well as Angle, which lets you run the GLES3 backend on top of Angle on top of GLES2/DX11. They tend to be fairly buggy and incomplete, though. Arguably only usable for simple 2D games.

There's been no real demand or contributors to improve it, but it's open source so there's no reason you or anyone else could stamp out the bugs https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu#supported-platforms.

It's become rather popular in the graphics (e.g. https://wgpu.rs/) and game dev (e.g. https://bevyengine.org/ ) spaces.

It's pretty popular for AWS Lambda functions.

Pretty popular for terminal / shell applications.

Definitely a great way to write wasm for compute or graphics intensive browser/web apps.

wgpu: Follows the WebGPU API and focuses on WebGL/WebGPU.

Which is blocked, waiting for glium to update: https://github.com/glium/glium/pull/2036

https://crates.io/crates/glium (8 months ago - 925 kB)

Hi rustaceans! I glued this prototype together with vtkio and glium. There are more features that are unsupported than supported at this point, but the code is here if you want to check it out: https://github.com/JeffIrwin/skillet

Should i learn glium (https://crates.io/crates/glium)? i have some experience in opengl (C++) and i would like to use the opengl functionality in the Rust ecosystem.

I can recommend https://github.com/glium/glium as a good, safe abstraction. There was a time when I wanted to learn shaders and write complex pipelines with several stages, this library allowed me to learn about the important objects and their responsibilities without having to program the very verbose chunks of code to initialize. I learned the following:

Glium is a Rust-y OpenGL wrapper, and its repository contains a discussion that should give you an idea whether this is what you want to use, as well as some tutorial.

If you don't know C++, don't let that deter you because if you can read Rust, you can read the C++ the author writes in the book. To interact with OpenGL I used glium; translating the C++ code to Rust/glium can be tricky though. The Rust equivalent to the linear algebra library the author uses (GLM) is nalgebra_glm.

Glium and ash provide low level access to different common graphics api's. I'm sure there's a good directx-11/12 bindings as well but I'm unfamiliar with what people use.

I was following the glium tutorials and I thought that I could play around with the code and move most of the logic over into a struct similar to what is done in this wgpu tutorial. However when I try to do that I get an issue saying that a move occurred because my struct didn't implement the copy trait, although neither did the tutorial on wgpu, so I am a bit confused as to why it works in the wgpu code and not in my code.

glium: https://github.com/glium/glium/tree/master/book wgpu: https://sotrh.github.io/learn-wgpu/