Getting Started Rust

WESL is designed to work with both JavaScript and Rust. We have two distinct implementations for these languages, wesl-js and wesl-rs.

Wesl can be operated in a few different ways:

• Using the standalone Command-Line tool to generate WGSL files.
• At build-time, using a Vite Plugin (JavaScript) or a Build Script (Rust).
• At run-time, using the linker libraries.

wesl-rs documentation: https://docs.rs/wesl/

Using the standalone CLI

• Install the CLI: cargo install --git https://github.com/wgsl-tooling-wg/wesl-rs wesl-cli
• Compile a shader: wesl compile <path/to/shader.wesl>
• Type wesl --help or visit the crate documentation (coming soon) for more configuration options.

Using wesl-rs at compile-time

• Add wesl-rs to your build-dependencies: cargo add --git https://github.com/wgsl-tooling-wg/wesl-rs --build wesl
• Create the file build.rs right next to your Cargo.toml.
• Paste this content:

  fn main() {
      wesl::Wesl::new_spec_compliant("src/shaders").build_artefact("main.wesl", "my_shader");
  }

• Place your shader in src/shaders/main.wesl.
• Paste this code where you want to access your shader string in Rust code:

  use wesl::include_wesl;
  const shader_string = include_wesl!("my_shader");

Using wesl-rs at run-time

• Add wesl-rs to your dependencies: cargo add --git https://github.com/wgsl-tooling-wg/wesl-rs wesl
• Place your shader in src/shaders/main.wesl.
• Paste this code where you want to access your shader string in Rust code:

  let shader_string = Wesl::new_spec_compliant("src/shaders")
      .compile("main.wesl")
      .inspect_err(|e| eprintln!("WESL error: {e}")) // pretty errors with `display()`
      .unwrap()
      .to_string();

Next Steps

Visit the Authoring Shaders page to learn how to write your first WESL shaders.

Visit the Reference page for the complete documentation of WESL Extensions.