ajnirp / gfx-rs

A high-performance, bindless graphics API for Rust.

gfx-rs

gfx-rs is a high-performance, bindless graphics API for the Rust programming language. It aims to be the default API for Rust graphics: for one-off applications, or higher level libraries or engines.

Why gfx-rs?

• Graphics APIs are mostly designed with C and C++ in mind, and hence are dangerous and error prone, with little static safety guarantees.
• Providing type safe wrappers around platform-specific APIs is feasible, but only pushes the problem of platform independence to a higher level of abstraction, often to the game or rendering engine.
• Modern graphics APIs, whilst providing a great degree of flexibility and a high level of performance, often have a much higher barrier to entry than traditional fixed-function APIs.
• Graphics APIs like OpenGL still require the developer to 'bind' and 'unbind' objects in order to perform operations on them. This results in a large amount of boiler plate code, and brings with it the usual problems associated with global state.

Goals

gfx-rs aims to be:

• type-safe and memory-safe
• compatible with Rust's concurrency model
• highly performant with minimal latency
• an abstraction over multiple graphics APIs: OpenGL, Direct3D, Mantle, etc.
• orthogonal to context backends: GLFW, SDL2, gl-init-rs, etc.

Non-goals

gfx-rs is not:

• a rendering engine
• a game engine
• bound to a specific maths library

gfx-rs will not handle:

• window and input management
• mathematics and transformations
• lighting and shadows
• visibility determination
• draw call reordering
• de-serializing of scene data formats
• abstractions for platform-specific shaders
• material abstractions

Getting started

Add the following to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies.gfx]
git = "http://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx-rs"

See the triangle example for a typical context initialization with glfw, or gl-init example for gl-init.

Building the examples

make -C src/examples

Note

gfx-rs is still in the early stages of development. Help is most appreciated.

If you are interested in helping out, you can contact the developers on Gitter. See contrib.md for contant information and contribution guidelines.