permutationlock / vulkan_hello_triangle_c99

A no dependency cross-compile friendly Vulkan triangle in C

A Vulkan Triangle in C99 (or later)

An implementation of the basic triangle drawing example from the Vulkan Tutorial with some changes:

• Vulkan 1.3 direct rendering is used in lieu of render passes;
• the volk dynamic loader is used in lieu of directly linking the libvulkan.so shared library.

The project design was inpsired by Chris Wellons' blog and raylib.

Requirements

To build the project you will need a C compiler that supports C99 or later, as well as a GLSL to SPIR-V compiler. The project supports Linux Wayland targets and Windows targets. There are ZERO build dependencies beyond the libc required by your target (e.g. glibc or musl for Linux, or mingw for Windows).

The project vendors and builds GLFW and volk. Also included are the headers for Vulkan, xkbcommon, Wayland, and the Wayland protocols.

To run the application you will need the Vulkan loader and a Vulkan driver for your graphics card. To run executables built with ENABLE_VALIDATION_LAYERS defined (which it is in the default CFLAGS) you will need to have the Vulkan validation layers installed as well.

To run on Linux you will need a Wayland compositor, the Wayland shared libraries, and the xkbcommon shared library. Note that installing virtually any Wayland compositor capable of Vulkan support will also install these libraries by default.

Building

The entire project builds with a single tiny Makefile.

Building on Linux

By default make will build with gcc and compile shaders with glslc.

make
./vulkan_app

If you have another compiler, then you can modify the appropriate environment variables to e.g. use clang.

make CC="clang"
./vulkan_app

The project will even build with the awesome and simple cproc compiler¹.

make CC="cproc" CFLAGS="-D\"__attribute(x)=\" -D\"__attribute__(x)=\"" \
    GLFW_FLAGS="-D\"__attribute(x)=\" -D\"__attribute__(x)=\""
./vulkan_app

You can easily cross-compile a Windows application from Linux with the Mingw-w64 toolchain.

make CC="x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc" CFLAGS="-std=c99 -O2" LDFLAGS="-mwindows" \
    GLFW_CFLAGS="-std=c99 -O2"

You can also cross-compile a Windows application with zig cc (or any clang toolchain set up with a Windows target).

make CC="zig cc -target x86_64-windows-gnu" \
    LDFLAGS="-lkernel32 -luser32 -lgdi32 -Wl,--subsystem,windows"

Building on Windows

On a Windows machine you can compile and run a Windows application with Mingw-w64.

make CFLAGS="-std=c99 -O2" GLFW_CFLAGS="-std=c11 -O2" LDFLAGS="-mwindows"
./vulkan_app.exe

Or build and run a Windows app with Zig.

make CC="zig cc" LDLFAGS="-lkernel32 -luser32 -lgdi32 -Wl,--subsystem,windows"
mv vulkan_app vulkan_app.exe
./vulkan_app.exe

You can also cross-compile a Linux application from Windows.

make CC="zig cc -target x86_64-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-std=c99 -O2" \
    GLFW_CFLAGS="-std=c99 -O2"

Footnotes

1. A small patch to QBE is required to increase the maximum identifier length. ↩