Vulkano

Note: requires Rust 1.9. This library would highly benefit from multiple upcoming features in Rust. Therefore it is likely that in the future you will need to update your version of Rust to continue using vulkano.

Vulkano is a Rust wrapper around the Vulkan graphics API. It follows the Rust philosophy, which is that as long as you don't use unsafe code you shouldn't be able to trigger any undefined behavior. In the case of Vulkan, this means that non-unsafe code should always conform to valid API usage.

What does vulkano do?

• Provides a low-levelish API around Vulkan. It doesn't hide what it does, but provides some comfort types.
• Plans to prevent all invalid API usages, even the most obscure ones. The purpose of vulkano is not to draw a teapot, but to cover all possible usages of Vulkan and detect all the possible problems. Invalid API usage is prevented thanks to both compile-time checks and runtime checks.
• Handles synchronization on the GPU side for you, as this aspect of Vulkan is both annoying to handle and error-prone. Dependencies between submissions are automatically detected, and semaphores are managed automatically. The behavior of the library can be customized thanks to unsafe trait implementations.
• Tries to be convenient to use. Nobody is going to use a library that requires you to browse the documentation for hours for every single operation.

Warning: this library breaks every five minutes for the moment.

Note that vulkano does not require you to install the official Vulkan SDK. This is not something specific to vulkano (you don't need to SDK to write program that use Vulkan, even without vulkano), but many people are unaware of that and install the SDK thinking that it is required.

Documentation

To get started you are encouraged to read the examples in examples/src/bin, starting with the triangle example.

Structure

This repository contains four libraries:

• vulkano is the main one.
• vulkano-shaders can analyse SPIR-V shaders at compile-time.
• vulkano-win provides a safe link between vulkano and the winit library which can create a window where to render to.
• glsl-to-spirv can compile GLSL to SPIR-V by wrapping around glslang. glsl-to-spirv is an implementation detail that you don't need to use manually if you use vulkano.

Once procedural macros are stabilized in Rust, the vulkano-shaders crate will be merged with the vulkano crate. The glsl-to-spirv crate is an implementation detail of vulkano and is not supposed to be used directly if you use vulkano. You are, however, free to use it if you want to write an alternative to vulkano.

This crate uses the Cargo workspaces feature that is available only in nightly, and whose purpose is to make several crates share the same target/ directory. It is normal to get an error if you try to run cargo build at the root of the directory.

In order to run tests, go to the vulkano subdirectory and run cargo test. Make sure your Vulkan driver is up to date before doing so.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.