Automatically-generated D bindings for Vulkan. Acquiring Vulkan functions is based on Intel API without Secrets

The bindings have two configurations: the default configuration, where the bindings load all functions from the vkGetInstanceProcAddr, which you supply when loading; and the with-derelict-loader configuration, which uses the Derelict library to load vkGetInstanceProcAddr for you.

To use in the default configuration:

1. Import via import dvulkan;.
2. Get a pointer to the vkGetInstanceProcAddr, through platform-specific means (ex. loading the Vulkan shared library, or glfwGetInstanceProcAddress if using GLFW).
3. Call DVulkanLoader.loadGlobalLevelFunctions(getProcAddr), where getProcAddr is the address of the loaded vkGetInstanceProcAddr function, to load the following functions:
   • vkGetInstanceProcAddr (sets the global variable from the passed value)
   • vkCreateInstance
   • vkEnumerateInstanceExtensionProperties
   • vkEnumerateInstanceLayerProperties
4. Create a VkInstance using the above functions.
5. Call DVulkanLoader.loadInstanceLevelFunctions(instance) to load additional VkInstance related functions. Get information about available physical devices (e.g. GPU(s), APU(s), etc.) and physical device related resources (e.g. Queue Families, Queues per Family, etc. )
6. Now two options are available to acquire device and device resource related functions (functions with first param of VkDevice, VkQueue or VkCommandBuffer):
   • Call DVulkanLoader.loadDeviceLevelFunctions(instance), the acquired functions call indirectly through the VkInstance and will be internally dispatched by the implementation
   • Call DVulkanLoader.loadDeviceLevelFunctions(device), the acquired functions call directly the logical VkDevice and related resources. In a multi physical device environment this function must be called once per required physical device.

To use in the with-derelict-loader configuration, follow the above steps, but call DVulkanDerelict.load() instead of performing steps two and three.

Available configurations:

• with-derelict-loader fetches derelictUtil, gets a pointer to vkGetInstanceProcAddr and loads few additional global functions
• with-global-enums forwards named enums into global scope
• with-derelict-loader-and-global-enums combines the two above

The API is similar to the C Vulkan API, but with some differences:

• Named enums in D are not global, you need to specify the enum type. Ex: VkResult.VK_SUCCESS instead of just VK_SUCCESS. Optionally you can use the configuration with-global-enums so that all enum definitions are forwarded into global scope.
• All structures have their sType field set to the appropriate value upon initialization; explicit initialization is not needed.
• VkPipelineShaderStageCreateInfo.module has been renamed to VkPipelineShaderStageCreateInfo._module, since module is a D keyword.

Examples can be found in the examples directory, and ran with dub run d-vulkan:examplename.

If you wish to create vulkan surface(s) yourself (instead of using e.g. glfw) you need to specify the required platform as compiler version flag. The available platform specifiers are the same as those found in vk_platform.h. In such a case a platform specific d module will be publicly imported into types.d so that required platform specific types and functions become available. A twist is that the only API included in phobos is the windows API hence the module core.sys.windows.windows is publicly imported in the case of VK_USE_PLATFORM_WIN32_KHR. In all other cases the imported module names are the same as the corresponding includes in the vk_platform.h, only exception is wayland_client in case of wayland-client.h. You need to instruct dmd/dub with the proper path to such a module and/or edit the respective line in versions.d

To generate bindings (Requires Python 3 and lxml.etree) download the Vulkan-Docs repo and do one of two things:

• run vkdgen.py passing path/to/vulkan-docs as first argument and an output folder for the D files as second argument
• copy/move/symlink vkdgen.py into src/spec/, cd there, and execute it, passing in an output folder to place the D files as the only argument.