violet

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Buffers
• Features
  • Violet Shading Language (VSL)
• Getting Started
• Benchmarks
• Compatibility

Hello Triangle

Introduction

Violet is an incredibly tiny (<300K) cross-platform low level graphics API. Violet makes use of Violet Shading Language (VSL) to enable quickly authoring cross-platform shaders.

Buffers

Buffers in Violet can contain any data used between the CPU and GPU. Buffers can then be bound sequentially (with encoder.set_vertex_buffer or encoder.set_fragment_buffer) in the order in which they appear in the shader code.

struct View {
    float4 view_matrix[16];
    float4 proj_matrix[16];
};
 
View camera;
Handle<Buffer> view_buffer = renderer.create_buffer(&camera, sizeof(View));
 
render_encoder.set_vertex_buffer(view_buffer); // View is available in shader

Features

Features

Violet Shading Language (VSL)

Violet provides a shading language for easily authoring cross-platform shaders.

struct VertexIn {
    float2 position @attribute(position);
    float3 color @attribute(color);
};
struct VertexOut {
    float4 position @position;
    float4 color @color;
};
VertexOut vertex_main(VertexIn input) @vertex {
    VertexOut output;
    output.position = float4(input.position.x, input.position.y, 0.0, 1.0);
    output.color = float4(input.color, 1.0);
    return output;
}
float4 fragment_main(VertexOut input) @fragment {
    return input.color;
}

Getting Started

Benchmarks

Compatibility

Platform	API	Status
Windows	D3D11	🚧 In-Progress
macOS and iOS	Metal	✅ Implemented
Linux	OpenGL4	❌ Planned
Web	WebGL2	🚧 In-Progress

Violet has been tested the following compilers:

• Clang 15.0.0 (macOS)
• GCC 11.4.0 (Linux)
• MSVC 19.41.34120 (Windows)