A Prototype Of The Vulkan Portability Initiative: Low-Level 3D To Vulkan / D3D12 / Metal

A Mozilla engineer has put out a prototype library in working on the Vulkan Portability Initiative for allowing low-level 3D graphics support that's backed by Vulkan / Direct3D 12 / Metal.

With Apple sticking to their own Metal graphics API and Direct3D 12 still being the dominant graphics API on Windows 10, The Khronos Group has been working towards better 3D portability for where Vulkan may not be directly supported by the OS/drivers or otherwise available. They've been working to target a subset of the Vulkan API that can be efficiently mapped to these other native graphics APIs and to have the libraries and tooling for better compatibility and code re-use of these different graphics APIs.

Today I came across the kvark/portability repository that is offering a prototype static library implementing the Vulkan Portability Initiative while being coded in Rust and using its new low-level layer. This code so far is being done by Mozilla's Dzmitry Malyshau. Mozilla has an interest in this 3D portability work and their interest in advancing 3D graphics on the web and pushing advancements to WebGL and a new low-level 3D graphics API for the multi-platform web.

So far this prototype library is in its early stages but it will be interesting to monitor its progress.