Khronos Group Release Vulkan-Hpp

 

Khronos Group, the organizational body behind OpenAL, OpenCV, OpenGL and it’s successor Vulkan, have just released Vulkan-hpp on Github.

Khronos introduces Vulkan Hpp, an open source Vulkan C++ API. Vulkan is a C API and as such inherits all common pitfalls of using a general C programming library. The motivation of a low-level Vulkan C++ API is to avoid these common pitfalls by applying commonly known C++ features while keeping the overall structure of a Vulkan program and preserving the full freedom it provides as low-level graphics API

 

As the description says, it’s a C++ API over top of the C based Khronos API.  The design goal is to add no additional overhead over using the C API, implemented entirely using header files.  Some of the headline features are:

  • Type-safe enums
  • Improvements to Bit Flags
  • String Conversions
  • Alternative Initialization of Structs
  • Enhancements beyond native Vulkan
  • Exceptions and Returns Types

 

There are a collection of C Vulkan examples ported to the new C++ wrapper available here.

 

To get started with Vulkan-Hpp:

  • Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/KhronosGroup/vkcpp
  • Update submodules: git submodule update --init --recursive
  • Use CMake to generate a solution or makefile for your favourite build environment
  • Launch the build

 

Vuklan-Hpp is available for download on Github here.

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