gfx-rs nuts and bolts

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2021-08-18 21:30:04

gfx-rs is a project bringing efficient cross-platform graphics to rust. This blog supposedly hosts the major milestones, concepts, and recaps of the project.

If you’ve been following these releases you’ll notice that gfx-hal is absent from this list. gfx-hal has now been deprecated in favor of a new abstraction layer inside of wgpu called wgpu-hal. To see more information about the deprecation, see the 0.9 release post.

Following our release cadence every few months, we rolled out 0.10 through all of the gfx-rs projects! See wgpu v0.10 changelog and naga v0.6 changelog for the details.

wgpu has had many new changes, the most notible of which is the switch to our new Harware Abstraction Layer wgpu-hal. This includes completely rebuilt backends which are more efficient, easier to maintain, and signifigantly leaner. As part of this, we have shedded our last C/C++ dependency spirv-cross. We now are entirely based on naga for all of our shader translation. This is not only a marked achievement for rust graphics, but has made wgpu safer and more robust.

This is an extremely big release for us. While we have confidence in our code and we have tested it extensively, we need everyone’s help in testing this new release! As such we ask if people can update to the latest wgpu and report to us any problems or issues you face.