shvulkan is a lightweight and flexible wrapper around the Vulkan® API written completely in C, that makes it easier to work with graphics efficiently without writing thousands of lines of code.

Scene example: alfa blending, instancing and indexed draw calls example.

Headless scene example using vulkan-virtual-outputs: alfa blending, instancing and indexed draw calls also here, but the images are streamed in an http server.

Build status

The examples are frequently being tested on Windows 11, NixOS (with Nix flake), Linux Mint (virtual machine and pc) with different compilers (MSVC, gcc), hardware configurations (RX580 4GB GDDR5, Radeon V Carrizo 500MB) and windowing systems (Win32, X11, Wayland).

Clone and Build

Open the terminal and run the following commands:

Be sure to have installed the official Vulkan® SDK from LunarG, then run the following commands:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/mrsinho/shvulkan.git
cd shvulkan
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DSH_VULKAN_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON ..
cmake --build .
 
cd bin/examples
 
start shvulkan-clear-color
start shvulkan-scene
start shvulkan-compute-power-numbers

On Debian and similar distribution before building the project you first need to install some packages:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo apt update -y
 
sudo apt install -yy libvulkan-dev libvulkan1 vulkan-utils mesa-vulkan-drivers
sudo apt install -yy libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev

Now run these commands to build:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/mrsinho/shvulkan.git
cd shvulkan
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DSH_VULKAN_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON ..
cmake --build .
 
cd bin/examples
 
./shvulkan-clear-color & ./shvulkan-scene & ./shvulkan-compute-power-numbers

Tested on X11 and Wayland graphics servers. The Nix flake lets the system choose the default windowing system.

Warning: While testing with Wayland revealed no issues, there are some resizing issues when using X11.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/mrsinho/shvulkan.git
cd shvulkan
nix build
nix develop
cd result/examples/bin
./shvulkan-clear-color & ./shvulkan-scene & ./shvulkan-compute-power-numbers

NixOS Wayland

CMake targets and variables

CMake Target	Type	Configure Flags
shvulkan	library	/
shvulkan-docs	Doxygen outputs	SH_VULKAN_BUILD_DOCS=ON
shvulkan-clear-color	executable	SH_VULKAN_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON
shvulkan-scene	executable	SH_VULKAN_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON
shvulkan-compute-example	executable	SH_VULKAN_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON

If the cmake option SH_VULKAN_BUILD_EXAMPLES is enabled, the additional glfw target will be generated as a static library.

CMake Variable	About
SH_VULKAN_VERSION	Version of the shvulkan library
SH_VULKAN_ROOT_DIR	Absolute path to the root of the repository directory
SH_VULKAN_LIB_DIR	Absolute path to the output library directory
SH_VULKAN_BIN_DIR	Absolute path to the output executable directory

Embed shvulkan with your C/C++ projects

To link to the shvulkan library with CMake:

if (NOT TARGET shvulkan)
 
set(SH_VULKAN_ROOT_DIR     path/to/shvulkan/root/directory)
set(SH_VULKAN_BINARIES_DIR path/your/binaries/directory)
 
include(${SH_VULKAN_ROOT_DIR}/shvulkan/shvulkan.cmake)
build_shvulkan()
 
endif()
 
# [...]
 
target_link_libraries(app PUBLIC shvulkan)

Then, include the shVulkan.h header file:

#include <shvulkan/shVulkan.h>

shVulkan.h

Examples

shvulkan ships with one compute example, one graphics clear color example, one graphics scene example and a headless scene graphics example, which instead of presenting images to the screen it streams the graphics output with an http server.