portability

Vulkan Portability Implementation

Explore on GitHub Read Hacker News discussions

4Distinct people

6Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

389GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Vulkan Portability Implementation

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

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

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 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 month6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-06-05 01:54:04 UTC to 2019-09-30 19:06:39 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	Comments
Jun 2018	2018-06-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-07-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
Jul 2018	2018-07-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 2018	2018-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-09-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Sep 2018	2018-09-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-10-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Oct 2018	2018-10-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-11-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Nov 2018	2018-11-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Dec 2018	2018-12-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jan 2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Feb 2019	2019-02-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-03-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 2019	2019-03-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 2019	2019-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-05-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
May 2019	2019-05-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-06-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jun 2019	2019-06-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-07-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Jul 2019	2019-07-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 2019	2019-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-09-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Sep 2019	2019-09-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-10-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

6 sources

grovesNL·Sep 30, 2019

For what it's worth, rx is already targeting multiple native graphics APIs (Vulkan/Metal/etc.) with a shared codebase through wgpu [0], so MoltenVK isn't necessary here anyway. It might also be interesting to mention that wgpu is implemented with gfx-hal, which provides a common abstraction for native graphics APIs. But besides wgpu, gfx-hal is used in the implementation of gfx-portability [1], which is a MoltenVK alternative that runs on Metal, DX12, and DX11. [0]: https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu [1]: https://github.com/gfx-rs/portability

In Rx – Extensible pixel editor implemented in Rust, inspired by Vi

grovesNL·Jun 16, 2019

Not exclusively -- gfx-portability (https://github.com/gfx-rs/portability) is another option.

In Ray Tracing with Metal [video]

erlend_sh·Nov 2, 2018

gfx-rs is solving the same problem with a different approach. https://github.com/gfx-rs/portability

In Introducing Zink: OpenGL on Vulkan

kvark·Aug 8, 2018

gfx-rs does expose Vulkan frontent: https://github.com/gfx-rs/portability I'd love to get started on GNM but licensing is tricky, given that gfx-rs is a community project.

In Bringing Vulkan everywhere

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

kvark·Jun 5, 2018

https://github.com/gfx-rs/portability may be relevant out side of Rust, since it's a linkable C library.

In Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL