vks is a Vulkan bridge for Go. The header generator folder contains the code that is used to generate the vulkan bindings. It woks similar to c-for-go, but it uses the vulkan specification published as XML to generate the output bindings.
Unlike c-for-go, this wrapper does very little memory management for you. Most of the logic is for converting from Cgo types into go types. Ensuring that C memory is allocated and released is up to the program, not to this binding.
A helper method for CPtr() exists that makes it easier to copy the structure to C. The program must call free on that structure to release the C memory. It uses the Function options pattern to for building the structs. An implementation of a autorelease pool is included as well to reduce the amount of deferred Free() calls in your code.
A list of the enabled features and extensions is available in the vkxml.yml file.
The project doesn't do much to make the Vulkan APIs much easier to use. Commands and types have the Vk prefix stripped, but not the constants. Facade objects are used to access the methods, as they combine the function poitners with the handle required to invoke the function. Most of this was on purpose to make it familiar for anyone coming from the specification.
An example application is included in the code base. It isn't trying to be a complete application. It mostly demonstrates how some of the foundational aspects of Vulkan are done with this binding: Creating structures, creating an instance, and using pNext. More complete examples are available at ibd1279/vks-examples.
The expected usage is to configure a vkxml.yml file for a project, and use the header-generator program to expose the vulkan functionality you need to your program.
That being said, I intend to keep the (in my opinion) most common extensions enabled and available for vks, partially for testing, and partially as a living example of expected usage.
Listed in no particular order:
- add WSI support, and putting certain extension data in different files (with different build tags).
- Put better documentation into the output. Hoping to find a way to pull some of the Vulkan docs into the file.