VKEW

Vulkan Extension Wrangler

VKEW is a single-header Vulkan Extension Wrangler, generated from the Vulkan registry

This automates the task of calling vkGetInstanceProcAddr() and vkGetDeviceProcAddr() for every non-core function you may need, this does not replace, but instead complement, the usual way you access Vulkan on your platform.

Naming and general "way of working" is inspired by GLEW. However, VKEW is a really small header-only library and do not interfere with the linking process

How to use VKEW

//Include Vulkan your usual way. Assuming from now all the necessary VULKAN_USE_PLATFORM macros are also defined
#include "vkew.h"


//Init VKEW for the current vulkan instance
vkewInitInstance(instance);

//Init VKEW for the current device
vkewInitDevice(device);


//Check for the extension command to be loaded
if(vkSomeFunctionEXT != NULL)
{
    //the vkSomeFunctionEXT Vulkan command is not null and callable
}

//If you want to unload all loaded pointers
vkewQuit();

How to generate vkew.h

Make sure you have python3 and git installed on your system, run the following:

git clone <this repository address> -- recursive
cd vkew
python3 gen.py 

To select the version of Vulkan the header is generated against, simply checkout the correct tag of the Vulkan-Headers submodule.

The recommended approach for that is to check the content of the VK_HEADERS_VERSION macro used in your project/Vulkan SDK installation, and find the tag in question.

cd Vulkan-Headers
git checkout v1.2.203 # For example, the Android NDK shipped with header version == 203 at the time we're writing this.
cd ..
python ./gen.py

Legal

vkew.h and the generator script Copyright (C) 2023 LIV Inc. Licensed under the MIT License Agreement

Vulkan™ is a trademark owned by The Khronos Group Inc. and is registered as a trademark in China, the European Union, Japan and the United Kingdom.