Writing rendering stuff in Vulkan requires a lot of boilerplate code, unlike OpenGL and Direct3D 9. This is the cost we pay for low-level and high-performant API, where we can control a lot of things that previously only graphics driver was responsible for. Vulkan has very verbose interface where you have to initialize a lot of structures to get things work. This complicates fast prototyping, makes your program error prone and hard to read and understand.

There are a lot of different C bindings, developed to simplify usage of Vulkan, including:

• Vulkan-Hpp
  
• Anvil
  
• V-EZ
  
• Vookoo
  

and many others, but I've found that no one suitable for my purposes, because their implementations are different from my vision how such wrapper should be implemented and used. So eventually I decided to write my own.

Magma is all about initialization. It was designed with simplicity of object construction in mind. Initialization exploit C RAII idiom with constructor overloading and default parameters that can be omitted. Also library has a lot of pre-defined state objects, so developer can use them without initialization of custom states. With this approach construction of the most complex Vulkan object - VkPipeline - takes only a dozen lines of code.

All objects are inherited from two types: Dispatchable and NonDispatchable, according to API specification. These types in turn are inherited from base Object class. Render state objects are simply structures that inherited from Vulkan structures and has plenty of constructors to conveniently initialize state description. They don't have any additional members, so user can safely cast an array of state objects to an array of Vulkan structures. All state objects have ::hash() method, which can be used to quickly lookup similar pipeline states in the cache instead of creating a new one.

The library was designed with zero or almost zero overhead in mind. While C exceptions are heavily used during object construction time, there are numerous methods marked with "noexcept" specifier. Consider, for example, VkCommandBuffer object:

• Most of wrapper's methods don't throw any exceptions.
• Parameters like shared pointers are passed by reference, so there is no reference counter increment/decrement.
• Thin methods around API calls are made inline.

Command buffer's calls in release build should be as much efficient as native C API calls.

Predefined render states are usually "constexpr" objects, which means that they are initialized at compile-time (not run-time), mapping efficiently to low-level API.

The library often allocates temporary arrays on the stack instead of creating them in the heap. This may cause stack overflow in abuse cases, but speeds up allocations and reduces memory fragmentation in run-time.

Defining descriptor set layouts usually the most complicated part of Vulkan API and often results in a lot of entagled code. From conceptual point of view, it should be done using reflection between C and GLSL code. Reflection is a mechanism making it possible to investigate yourself. In programming languages, reflection is used to investigate format of objects at runtime, invoke methods and access fields of these objects. While C doesn't support true reflection, Magma is trying to mimic it using variadics and SPIR-V reflection data. This allows to define descriptor set layouts as regular C structures and check their validity against specific shader bytecode. At run-time, you can assign resources (images, buffers, uniforms) to descriptor bindings and they will be attached to shader when descriptor set is binded using command buffer.

While it is legal to create buffers and images without custom memory allocator, it is highly encouraging to provide host and device memory allocators during resource creation. Keep in mind that there is an implementation-dependent limit of a number of memory allocations reported by VkPhysicalDeviceLimits::maxMemoryAllocationCount, so per-object allocation approach suitable only for a small graphics applications. Custom allocator allows sub-allocations from larger memory chunks and reduces memory fragmentation in dynamic scenarios. Magma provides IDeviceMemoryAllocator interface that allows you to implement your own allocator or you can use a default one which is written on top of Vulkan Memory Allocator. Usually "allocator" parameter is the first among default parameters passed in the constructor which simplifies construction expressions.

Magma was written mainly around Vulkan 1.0 specification, but has built-in support for some extensions, like NVidia ray-tracing, fill rectangle primitive and some other minor extensions. There are a lot of mobile hardware that support only Vulkan 1.0, so it is better to have a wider range of compatible hardware rather than a questionable features. Support for new API versions (1.1 and beyond) still not implemented.

Magma provides some auxiliary objects that were written on top of core functionality. Their goals are to facilitate development by providing typical operations used in 3D graphics. For example, sometimes I miss immediate mode from OpenGL 1.x era, where you can quickly draw a few primitives with glBegin/glEnd. Or often there is need to quickly present rendered image to the screen, or create shader from GLSL source instead of pre-compiled SPIR-V binary and so on. Auxiliary objects are placed in nested namespace and are not part of the Magma core.

Some auxiliary objects use built-in precompiled shaders. Hash of a bytecode of these shaders calculated in compile-time to reduce loading overhead.

There are dependencies from the following third party libraries:

• shaderc - a collection of tools, libraries, and tests for Vulkan shader compilation.
• SPIRV-Reflect - a lightweight library that provides a C/C reflection API for SPIR-V shader bytecode in Vulkan applications.
• Vulkan Memory Allocator - Vulkan memory allocation library.

Library depends on STL and has not been designed to be used with custom containers. It doesn't use any file input/output.

Code is written in modern C 11/14 and takes advantage of new language features.

Supported compilers:

• MSVC
• GCC
• MinGW

Install Git and Make (if not available):

sudo apt update
sudo apt install git
sudo apt install make

For Xlib, install X11 headers and libraries:

sudo apt install libx11-dev

For XCB:

sudo apt install xcb
sudo apt install libxcb-icccm4-dev

• LunarG Vulkan SDK
  

Go to the directory where .run file was saved:

chmod ugo x vulkansdk-linux-x86_64-<version>.run
./vulkansdk-linux-x86_64-<version>.run
cd VulkanSDK/<version>/
source ./setup-env.sh

Check that Vulkan environment variables are present:

printenv | grep Vulkan

If you have error glslangValidator': Permission denied after running Make, go to bin directory of Vulkan SDK, and add executable permission to this file:

chmod  x glslangValidator

Visual Studio project is located in the magma/projects/vs directory. If you are using Visual Studio older or newer than 2017 version, open project property page Configuration Properties/General and configure Platform Toolset property. It may be neccessary to adjust Windows SDK Version property too in the case if you get an error like this:

error MSB8036: The Windows SDK version 10.0 was not found. Install the required version of Windows SDK or change the SDK version in the project property pages or by right-clicking the solution and selecting "Retarget solution".

Also there is a command-line build option:

• Open x64 Native Tools Command Prompt (e.g. through Taskbar's Search box).
• Go to magma directory.
• Set DEBUG variable to choose between Debug or Release build, run build script.

set DEBUG=1
build

By default, debug version of static library is builded. If you want to build a release one, set DEBUG=0. Build files are located in the magma/projects/vs/x64/Debug(Release) directory

Qt Creator project is located in the magma/projects/qt directory. To successfully compile the library, you need to setup path to Vulkan SDK as environment variable. Go to Edit/Preferences (or Tools/Options), open property page Build and Run, then select Kits tab. Find Environment property, click "Change" button and add path to Vulkan SDK directory:

To compile for specific platform, open magma.pro file, and add definition of the target platform, e.g.:

QMAKE_CXXFLAGS  = -DVK_USE_PLATFORM_XCB_KHR

By default, Qt Creator uses only single CPU core, which slows down compilation significantly. To enable multi-core compilation, select Projects, open Build Settings page, navigate to Build Steps and set Parallel jobs value to the number of CPU threads you want to assign for compilation. For older versions of Qt IDE, navigate to Build Environment section and add new variable MAKEFLAGS -j<N>, where N is the number of CPU threads you want to assign for compilation.

Also there is a command-line build option:

• Open terminal.
• Go to magma directory.
• Run GNU Make.

make DEBUG=1 -j<N>

where N is the number of CPU threads you want to assign for compilation. By default, debug version of static library is builded, so DEBUG flag can be omitted. If you want to build a release one, explicitly specify DEBUG=0.

Vulkan supports different windowing system. By default, XCB is used. If you want to switch to Xlib, open Makefile and replace

PLATFORM=VK_USE_PLATFORM_XCB_KHR

with

PLATFORM=VK_USE_PLATFORM_XLIB_KHR

Other compositors like Wayland or XRANDR have not been tested.

To test that all components of the library work as expected, I wrote a collection of samples that use Magma. They are written in a cross-platform way (Windows/Linux) to make sure that library is able to work on all platforms.

You can find these samples here: graphics and ray-tracing.