How to design API of a library for Vulkan?

Fri
08
Feb 2019

In my previous blog post yesterday, I shared my thoughts on graphics APIs and libraries. Another problem that brought me to these thoughts is a question: How do you design an API for a library that implements a single algorithm, pass, or graphics effect, using Vulkan or DX12? It may seem trivial at first, like a task that just needs to be designed and implemented, but if you think about it more, it turns out to be a difficult issue. They are few software libraries like this in existence. I don’t mean here a complex library/framework/engine that “horizontally” wraps the entire graphics API and takes it to a higher level, like V-EZ, Nvidia Falcor, or Google Filament. I mean just a small, “vertical”, plug-in library doing one thing, e.g. implementing ambient occlusion effect, efficient texture mipmap down-sampling, rendering UI, or simulating particle physics on the GPU. Such library needs to interact efficiently with the rest of the user’s code to be part of a large program or game. Vulkan Memory Allocator is also not a good example of this, because it only manages memory, implements no render passes, involves no shaders, and it interacts with a command buffer only in its part related to memory defragmentation.

I met this problem at my work. Later I also discussed it in details with my colleague. There are multiple questions to consider:

This is a problem similar to what we have with any C++ libraries. There is no consensus about the implementation of various basic facilities, like strings, containers, asserts, mutexes etc., so every major framework or game engine implements its own. Even something so simple as min/max function is defined is multiple places. It is defined once in <algorithm> header, but some developers don’t use STL. <Windows.h> provides its own, but these are defined as macros, so they break any other, unless you #define NOMINMAX before the include… A typical C++ nightmare. Smaller libraries are better just configurable or define their own everything, like the Vulkan Memory Allocator having its own assert, vector (can be switched to standard STL one), and 3 versions of read-write mutex.

All these issues make it easier for developers to just write a paper, describe their algorithm, possibly share a piece of code, pseudo-code or a shader, rather than provide ready to use library. This is a very bad situation. I hope that over time patterns emerge of how the API of a library implementing a single pass or effect using Vulkan/DX12 should look like. Recently my colleague shared an idea with me that if there was some higher-level API that would implement all these interactions between various parts (like resource allocation, image barriers) and we all commonly agreed on using it, then authoring libraries and stitching them together on top of it would be way easier. That’s another argument for the need of such new, higher-level graphics API.

Comments | #gpu #vulkan #directx #libraries #graphics #c++ Share

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