gfx-rs

gfx

Rust2014–2020

gfx-rs / gfx

gfx

[maintenance mode] A low-overhead Vulkan-like GPU API for Rust.

Creative & Media Systems & Infrastructure

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19Distinct people

21Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

5.4KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

[maintenance mode] A low-overhead Vulkan-like GPU API for Rust.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

google/angle · linked in 3 of the same discussions
khronosgroup/moltenvk · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:59:58 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year21 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2014-11-15 01:01:43 UTC to 2020-05-06 12:47:00 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2014	2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1	0
2015	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2016	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	0	2
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	6	0	6
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	8	1	7
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	0	2

What Hacker News says

6 sources

erlend_sh·Dec 16, 2018

Awesome work! I hope you’ll consider involving the gfx-rs project in your learning streak. They are building an all-in-one graphics backend for use in Firefox but also the gamedev ecosystem, e.g. the Amethyst.rs game engine. https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx/issues/1900

In Rust and WebAssembly in 2019

tormeh·Oct 1, 2018

Well, some people are working on this: https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx/blob/master/README.md I think at this point it's clear that we'll NEVER have a cross-platform graphics API. The incentives for platform holders speak against it, and design by committee means the attempts are so inferior that devs would rather avoid them. We have to make wrappers. Ideally, they should translate at compile time.

In Introducing Dav1d: a new AV1 decoder

lambda·Jun 6, 2018

They do make some money on Macs, and Mac software, but not nearly as much as on iOS. Providing macOS gives a developer and designer platform for iOS. That is really important for them. So Metal being available on macOS is important for that reason. But it's also important in that the Mac platform is still important, just not nearly as important as iOS. OpenGL doesn't really have much of a future. Everyone is moving towards the next generation frameworks. It just happens that there was a lot of uncertainty about whether OpenGL could adapt or whether there would be a successor, and during that time Apple decided to invest in developing Metal. It wasn't until a couple of years later than Vulkan was released. In the meantime, Apple has built up quite a lot of tooling around Metal. And it's not like it's that difficult to write cross platform

Read the rest

apps that target the Mac. If you write against major engines, they will already have support for the different backends. If you are writing your own software, you can still target OpenGL, or you can target Vulkan and use MoltenVK to run it on macOS. And for the next several years, people writing portable software are going to have to either just target OpenGL, for compatibility with older graphics cards, or maintain at least two backends, OpenGL and Vulkan. Given that lots of games target DirectX first, and consider any of the cross-platform frameworks a porting effort, Apple probably doesn't consider it a big loss to add one more platform that needs to be ported to. What's going to wind up happening is more software like ANGLE (https://github.com/google/angle), MoltenVK (https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK), and gfx-rs (https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx and https://github.com/gfx-rs/portability, see http://gfx-rs.github.io/2018/04/09/vulkan-portability.html for details) for providing one set of abstractions on top of several different backends.

In Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

lewisinc·Jun 4, 2018

Well, at least in the Rust ecosystem there is https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx which provides backends for Vulcan, Direct X 12, Metal and OpenGL. I'm not sure it's super relevant outside of the Rust ecosystem right now, but it's worth spreading the word around of such solutions.

In Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL

moosingin3space·Jun 4, 2018

If you're programming in Rust, you can just use `gfx-rs`'s HAL[1]. This is designed to be a Vulkan-like API that works on top of Vulkan, Metal, D3D12, or OpenGL. If you aren't in Rust, just use Vulkan. There are high-performance wrappers for it in various stages of development, such as MoltenVK[2] for macOS and iOS, and VulkanOnD3D12[3] for UWP. Non-UWP Windows, Linux, and Android should support Vulkan natively through their GPU drivers. [1]: https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx [2]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK [3]: https://github.com/Chabloom/VulkanOnD3D12

In Apple introduces macOS Mojave

kvark·Jan 20, 2018

At this point, since there is no consensus on the shape of the API or even the concrete feature set/programming model, we decided to focus on the low-level graphics abstraction layer ([1]) instead of pushing the WebGPU-Servo prototype further. This can change once things clear up a bit. [1] http://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx

In WebGPU demos