ErupteD Brings Vulkan To The D Programming Language

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ErupteD Brings Vulkan To The D Programming Language

Yesterday's article about a new OS kernel being written in the D programming language led to a Phoronix reader pointing out that Vulkan support has also come to the D language...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ErupteD-Vulkan-D

[coder]

It seems like this isn't even the first such project, as the README.md compares itself to a project called D-Vulkan.

I do wonder how much sense it makes to use such a low-level API, directly from higher-level languages. The language overhead should start to nullify some of Vulkan's efficiency benefits. With its garbage collection, I feel D is starting to get in that direction.

Anyway, more people using Vulkan is better, right?

[GreatEmerald]

Hm, I'm surprised this isn't (yet) DerelictVk. It's already using much of Derelict infrastructure, so why not just have it live within Derelict itself, along side the bindings to OpenGL, OpenGL, GLFW etc.
Though generally I find Derelict to be a bit too thin of a wrapper, but in the case of Vulkan that does make sense.

[zeroepoch]

Not the best choice of name for a software project.

[boxie]

what I want to know is when will it be merged with the D Kernel project so we can have some sweet boot screens

[kayosiii]

It seems like this isn't even the first such project, as the README.md compares itself to a project called D-Vulkan.

I do wonder how much sense it makes to use such a low-level API, directly from higher-level languages. The language overhead should start to nullify some of Vulkan's efficiency benefits. With its garbage collection, I feel D is starting to get in that direction.

Anyway, more people using Vulkan is better, right?

D is a systems programming language. You can write code as low level as C++/C fairly easily and generally express your design in fewer lines of code. It's not as fun as just using the Garbage Collector but IMO still more fun than using C++/C.

One of the things really going for D with regards to Vulcan is that it is able to represent signal based code a lot more cleanly than C++/C can.
example taken from an audio program I am working on.

input_buffer[0..n].volume_xform(lvl).pan_xform(channel,pos).copy(out put_buffer[0..n]);

where volume_xform and pan_xform are lazily generated functions that return structs that know how to iterate through themselves. A lot of work has gone into making the codegen competitive with code written in the way that you would for C++.

[kayosiii]

Technically these aren't bindings since D interfaces directly with C and doesn't use a binding layer.

"D versions of the C header files" would be more accurate but does sound less snappy.