A Prototype Of The Vulkan Portability Initiative: Low-Level 3D To Vulkan / D3D12 / Metal

[kvark]

What is the benefit of gfx-rs in comparison with something like vulkano? Is it significantly higher level?

gfx-hal is almost orthogonal to vulkano. We are implementing Vulkan on D3D12 and Metal, adding just a tiny bit of type sugar for those linking with Rust directly (as opposed to C-bindings and vulkan.h). vulkano is a type-safe Rust library on top of Vulkan, it's not zero cost, and it's not accessible from other languages. At some point, we'll be able to run vulkano on top of gfx-hal. We also have plans (and some code) for a higher level (gfx-render), but this is not the focus of the team at the moment, and has nothing to do with Vulkan Portability.

TL;DR: these libraries cover different needs. If you need Vulkan only, less headache, and more types, then vulkano is for you. If you need near-zero-cost portability, then gfx-rs.
A long and somewhat heated discussion about the topic can be found on Rust forum gfx-rs vs Vulkano topic.

[shmerl]

A long and somewhat heated discussion about the topic can be found on Rust forum gfx-rs vs Vulkano topic.

Thanks for the link, that was very interesting. I suppose such cross API initiatives are to be expected because MS and Apple are bad actors so there is a need to work around their lock-in.

[Tomin]

Nobody yet replied with this?
https://xkcd.com/927/

I think this does not apply here. I mean this portability initiative is about finding the common subset of current standards to help creating cross platform applications.

[mrtruxton]

Wouldn't it be a better idea to look into the possibility of creating a vulkan -> metal conversion for mac?
Something like MoltenVK. https://moltengl.com/moltenvk/
That way we would only have to target vulkan and be done with it.

[muncrief]

My goodness Micheal, I certainly hope you wrote these articles before the 23rd! We greatly appreciate your hard work but you're entitled to take holidays off, especially family ones like Thanksgiving and Christmas In any case, I hope you had a fantastic Thanksgiving!