Golem

golem is an opinionated mostly-safe graphics API

When possible, golem should make simple things safe (bind objects before acting on them, or check if they're bound for objects that are expensive to bind.) However, when not possible or convenient (bounds checking the indices in an element buffer, for example), golem provides unsafe APIs with well-defined safety conditions.

A minimal example to display a triangle:

use golem::*;
use golem::Dimension::*;
fn func(ctx: &Context) -> Result<(), GolemError> {
 let vertices = [
     // Position         Color
     -0.5, -0.5,         1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0,
     0.5, -0.5,          0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0,
     0.0, 0.5,           0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0
 ];
 let indices = [0, 1, 2];

 let mut shader = ShaderProgram::new(
     ctx,
     ShaderDescription {
         vertex_input: &[
             Attribute::new("vert_position", AttributeType::Vector(D2)),
             Attribute::new("vert_color", AttributeType::Vector(D4)),
         ],
         fragment_input: &[Attribute::new("frag_color", AttributeType::Vector(D4))],
         uniforms: &[],
         vertex_shader: r#" void main() {
         gl_Position = vec4(vert_position, 0, 1);
         frag_color = vert_color;
         }"#,
         fragment_shader: r#" void main() {
         gl_FragColor = frag_color;
         }"#,
     },
 )?;
 let mut vb= VertexBuffer::new(ctx)?;
 let mut eb  ElementBuffer::new(ctx)?;
 vb.set_data(&vertices);
 eb.set_data(&indices);
 shader.bind();
 ctx.clear();
 unsafe {
    shader.draw(&vb, &eb, 0..indices.len(), GeometryMode::Triangles)?;
 }
 Ok(())
}

The core type of golem is the Context, which is constructed from the glow::Context. From the Context, ShaderPrograms are created, which take in data from Buffers. Once the data is uploaded to the GPU via Buffer::set_data, it can be drawn via ShaderProgram::draw.

Initializing

The user is responsible for windowing and providing a valid glow Context to create a Context. You can try out the blinds crate, which works well with golem, but using winit directly or other windowing solutions like sdl2 are also options.

OpenGL Versions

The backend is currently implemented via glow, and it targets OpenGL 3.2 on desktop and WebGL 1 (so it should run on a wide range of hardware.) GL 3.2 is selected for maximum desktop availability, and WebGL 1 is available on 97% of clients to WebGL's 75% (taken from caniuse.com at time of writing.)

GLSL

Shaders are partially generated by golem at runtime, to deal with platform incompatibilities. The user provides the main function for the shader, and golem supplies the version number, the shader inputs, outputs, and uniforms. See the ShaderDescription docs for more.