A Guide to Rust Graphics Libraries as of 2019

https://wiki.alopex.li/AGuideToRustGraphicsLibraries2019

by pplonski86 • 7 years ago

154 23 7 years ago

wiki.alopex.li

chubs3• 7 years ago

Great write-up! I'd really like to know how gfx-hal handles shaders. Do you write shaders in some high-level language, and gfx translates them appropriately for the vulkan/metal/dx backends, and send them off to the GPU driver? If so, is this transpiling slow? Do you get slightly different visuals on different backends? Or even glitches on some? Thanks for the write-up :)

robmaister3• 7 years ago

I'm not familiar with the specifics within gfx-hal, but it's most likely taking in SPIR-V and translating as needed.

AFAIK DX12 still requires DXIL so it might be saving both SPIR-V and DXIL, or taking in HLSL and compiling/translating as needed.

Microsoft has generally gotten a lot friendlier in the last decade, they have tools to compile HLSL down to SPIR-V, if you want to support everything including DX12 you'll probably be writing HLSL. Otherwise you can pick any language that compiles down to SPIR-V.

https://github.com/Microsoft/ShaderConductor

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Cross

chubs3• 7 years ago

So from what I can find, it seems gfx-hal works with GLSL, compiles it to SPIRV, and then uses that (somehow). I'm just not sure how it uses the SPIRV for each backend.

mikekchar• 7 years ago

BTW, I just wanted to give a shout out to ggez (the author's game library). I've been playing with it and it's quite a lot of fun to use. I'm a novice in Rust and I found it to be quite a nice introduction to the language. There are a couple of bugs here and there, but pretty much it does what's printed on the box. Very nice documentation and lots of examples to work with too. And the cherry on the cake is raising an issue is a welcoming rather than harrowing experience. You get the feeling that whatever issues might crop up, you can work your way through them.

Edit: grammar

shepmaster• 7 years ago

If you are interested in hearing more from the author of ggez, check out their talk from Rust Belt Rust 2018:

- Evolving API design in Rust — Simon Nicholas Heath (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt1JOVeQ5hw)

icefoxen• 7 years ago

Hi, author here, happy to answer any questions people have.

young_unixer• 7 years ago

OpenGL: Basically Javascript for GPU’s.

Everyday we stray further from god's light.

jjtheblunt• 7 years ago

Yeah, that comment you cited is unbelievably misinformed.

rossy2• 7 years ago

I had a visceral reaction to that sentence too, but read the rest of the paragraph. It's not wrong in the way the author meant it. The author is saying that OpenGL is like JavaScript because it's high level, it's open and supported everywhere, it was designed in the 90s in a very different ecosystem to what we have today, and even though it's been updated and the old versions are no longer worth using (ECMAScript 3 and OpenGL 2.1,) the new versions still have a bunch of weird historical baggage. I don't see anything wrong with that.

slezyr• 7 years ago

Is it? Implementation of OpenGL basically a browser. It's a virtual machine that executes GLSL with garbage collector and other quirky stuff.

sanderjd• 7 years ago

Upvoted for the poetry. Thanks :)

_bxg12• 7 years ago

Very good deep-dive, but I'm surprised there was little mention of the higher-level libraries that do exist already. I've found kiss3d and three-rs, both of which seem pretty early but appear to let you "load a model you made in Blender and show it on screen".

rezeroed• 7 years ago

Kiss3d is great. It has some rendering issues on mac, but a great level of abstraction.

_bxg12• 7 years ago

Is it featured/mature enough for a full game?

Shikadi• 7 years ago

OpenGL: Basically the Javascript of graphics API’s.

Not trying to be rude, but I'd just like to point out the apostrophe on API's indicates ownership, as in "John's dog jumped". APIs is fine, as in "John has two dogs".

YohAsakura• 7 years ago

Thank you very much for such detailed explanation of what is what in the world of graphics, now I understand the basics and what all the cool words (metal, gfx-hal, opengl, etc.) mean.

A Guide to Rust Graphics Libraries as of 2019

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