Writing Shader Crates

This is section is going to walk you through writing a shader in Rust and setting up your shader crate.

Be aware that this project is in a very early phase, please file an issue if there's something not working or unclear.

Online

You can now test out and try building shaders with rust-gpu from the browser!

• SHADERed A shader IDE which has a lite version, which allows you to build and run shaders on the web.
• Shader Playground A playground for building and checking the output of shader code similar to godbolt or play.rust-lang.org.

Local Setup

There are two main ways to setup your shader project locally.

1. Using the spirv-builder crate. The spirv-builder is a crate designed to automate the process of building and linking the rust-gpu to be able to compile SPIR-V shaders into your main Rust crate.
2. Using .cargo/config. Alternatively if you're willing to do the setup yourself you can manually set flags in your cargo configuration to enable you to run cargo build in your shader crate.

Using spirv-builder

If you're writing a bigger application and you want to integrate SPIR-V shader crates to display, it's recommended to use spirv-builder in a build script.

1. Copy the rust-toolchain.toml file to your project. (You must use the same version of Rust as rust-gpu. Utimately, the build will fail with a nice error message when you don't use the exact same version)
2. Reference spirv-builder in your Cargo.toml:
   tomlCopy

   [build-dependencies]
   spirv-builder = "0.9"
   

   All dependent crates are published on crates.io.
3. Create a build.rs in your project root.

build.rs

Paste the following into build.rs

use spirv_builder::{MetadataPrintout, SpirvBuilder};

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    SpirvBuilder::new(shader_crate, target)
        .print_metadata(MetadataPrintout::Full)
        .build()?;
    Ok(())
}

Substituting shader_crate with a relative path to your shader crate. The values available for the target parameter are available here. For example, if building for vulkan 1.1, use "spirv-unknown-vulkan1.1".

The SpirvBuilder struct has numerous configuration options available, see documentation.

main.rs

The following will directly include the shader module binary into your application.

const SHADER: &[u8] = include_bytes!(env!("<shader_crate>.spv"));

Note If your shader name contains hyphens, the name of environment variable will be the name with hyphens changed to underscores.

Keep in mind that by default, build-dependencies are built in debug mode. This means that the rust-gpu compiler (rustc_codegen_spirv) will be built in debug mode, and will be incredibly slow. You can solve this by placing this bit of configuration in your workspace Cargo.toml:

# Compile build-dependencies in release mode with
# the same settings as regular dependencies.
[profile.release.build-override]
opt-level = 3
codegen-units = 16
[profile.dev.build-override]
opt-level = 3

Keep in mind this will optimize all build script dependencies as release, which may slow down full rebuilds a bit. Please read this issue for more information, there's a few important caveats to know about this.

Using .cargo/config

Note This method will require manually rebuilding rust-gpu each time there has been changes to the repository.

If you just want to build a shader crate, and don't need to automatically compile the SPIR-V binary at build time, you can use .cargo/config to set the necessary flags. Before you can do that however you need to do a couple of steps first to build the compiler backend.

1. Clone the rust-gpu repository
2. cargo build --release in rust-gpu.

Now you should have a librustc_codegen_spirv dynamic library available in target/release. You'll need to keep this somewhere stable that you can reference from your shader project.

Now we need to add our .cargo/config file. This is a configuration file that tells cargo how to build for SPIR-V. You need provide the target you're compiling for (see platform support) and provide a path to your built rustc_codegen_spirv dynamic library. We have to also provide some additional options.

[build]
target = "spirv-unknown-spv1.3"
rustflags = [
    "-Zcodegen-backend=<path_to_librustc_codegen_spirv>",
    "-Zbinary-dep-depinfo",
    "-Csymbol-mangling-version=v0",
    "-Zcrate-attr=feature(register_tool)",
    "-Zcrate-attr=register_tool(rust_gpu)"
]

[unstable]
build-std=["core"]
build-std-features=["compiler-builtins-mem"]

Now we can build our crate with cargo as normal.

cargo build

Now you should have <project_name>.spv SPIR-V file in target/debug that you can give to a renderer.

Writing your first shader

Configure your shader crate as a "dylib" type crate, and add spirv-std to its dependencies:

[lib]
crate-type = ["dylib"]

[dependencies]
spirv-std = { version = "0.9" }

Make sure your shader code uses the no_std attribute and makes the spirv attribute visibile in the global scope. Then, you're ready to write your first shader. Here's a very simple fragment shader called main_fs as an example that outputs the color red:

#![no_std]

use spirv_std::spirv;
use spirv_std::glam::{vec4, Vec4};

#[spirv(fragment)]
pub fn main_fs(output: &mut Vec4) {
    *output = vec4(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0);
}