cargo-generate Templates

[alphastrata]

I'll kick us off with one for compute shaders because that's what I'm interested in.

https://github.com/alphastrata/RustGPU_templates

Anybody got any others?

It'd be good to turn these over to the Rust-GPU org so they can be centralised here.

[Firestar99]

Example repos I have laying about:

• https://github.com/Firestar99/colorbubble/tree/cargo-gpu
  • using cargo-gpu from a build script as a lib
  • wgpu API
  • special branch of rust-gpu that transpiles it to wgsl with naga (really should start working on getting it merged)
  • was the experiment ground before I integrated it with graphite
• https://github.com/Firestar99/rust-gpu-vulkano-example
  • using spirv-builder directly with fixed toolchain
  • vulkano API (an abstraction on top of Vulkan)
  • I often send people asking for wgpu this way too, since I didn't have a wgpu template for a while

[alphastrata]

I have seen the cargo-gpu ones but, they don't seem to be super reliable yet?

Perhaps until we can guarantee they are we point folk in the direction of something like just for the builds? ( I just went with something that's at least Rusty...)

It'd be easy enough to include in the templating questions wgpu or ash -- but I suspect that the templates will be use moreso by folks just wanting to get started no?

Most folk who're working on a more serious project will probably cobble together their own build.rs and so on?

[Firestar99]

As I'm rewriting documentation, I want to build some official templates for people to use. Even in the docs, there are two essential decisions you need to make on how you want to set it up.

What API?

• Vulkan with the ash crate
  • Variant? compute, graphics
• wgpu
  • Variant? compute, graphics
  • Shader? spirv, wgsl (via naga transpilation, requires this PR to be merged)
• bevy shaders (just a special case of the above), graphics only
• maybe my rust-gpu-bindless library (for which no documentation exists, at all...)

What rust-gpu integration path?

• spirv-builder directly with fixed toolchain used in build.rs
• cargo-gpu from the cmdline
• cargo-gpu as a library used in build.rs

I wasn't aware of cargo-generate, but it's template language seems like the perfect way to easily integrate this two-dimensional feature matrix!

Before starting on the templates, I'm considering refactoring a few things beforehand on the spirv-builder and cargo-gpu side. I want to be able to always load the spirv-builder configuration from the Cargo.toml, not just when you use cargo-gpu from the command line, to allow you to more easily combine multiple integration paths. Primarily to allow something like cargo gpu clippy to work together with the other paths, since they currently write the config directly into the build script, which you can't easily parse from the cmdline.

[Firestar99]

There should also be a split between compute and graphics. I think it'll be best to "merge" that into the "What API?" enum and have wgpu_graphics and wgpu_compute templates, since bevy + compute doesn't really make any sense.

I'm gonna toy around with cargo-generate a bit and see if I can come up with some templates.

[alphastrata]

yeah good call.

[alphastrata]

rust-gpu Template Matrix

runner	spirv-builder (build.rs)	cargo‑gpu	Compute	Graphics
wgpu + SPIRV	1/2	TODO	✅ DONE	TODO
Vulkan (ash) + SPIRV	TODO	TODO	TODO	TODO
Bevy shaders	TODO (requires... lots of specialness)	TODO	TODO	TODO
rust‑gpu‑bindless	TODO (requires???)	TODO	TODO	TODO