GFX-RS Continues Advancing For High-Performance, Portable Graphics In Rust

GFX-RS has been the Rust programming language project for a high-performance, portable graphics API that can map to Vulkan, Apple's Metal, Direct3D, etc from a single Rust API.

Dzmitry Malyshau of Mozilla and Markus Siglreithmaier talked about this portable graphics abstraction project at the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting in Belgium. GFX-RS has been in development since 2013~2014 but is currently undergoing a "total rewrite" in trying to better this single Rust API that supports backends for all major graphics APIs.

GFX-RS has been focusing a lot of attention recently on SPIR-V/Vulkan support and in particular Khronos' work-in-progress effort around the Vulkan Portability Initiative for coming up with a subset of Vulkan that in turn can map nicely to the other major graphics APIs. The gfx-hal Hardware Abstraction Layer is currently working on implementing the Vulkan Portability interface with type safety handling for Rust.

GFX-RS has also been monitoring the work going around WebGPU and the possible "WebVulkan" low-level graphics API for the web in the future.

Those wishing to learn more about this Rust graphics project can do so via the FOSDEM 2018 slides (PDF) while if you want to jump straight into the project you can do so via their GitHub project.