Provides select Rust bindings for Apple Metal framework. May be compared to alternative crates metal, objrs_frameworks_metal, metal-rs, and metal-sys.
Part of the objr expanded universe, distinctive features of this library:
- Fast. This crate is significantly faster than other crates. If you're struggling to get 60fps or ProMotion/adaptive refresh rate speeds, this
is the solution for you.
- The full set of optimization is far too many to list, but the big idea is to either do what native ObjC/Swift applications do, or do something faster.
- Compile-time selectors. Most Rust crates do a runtime lookup for ObjC methods, which involves acquiring a lock and other yucky stuff, either on the first call or every call. Instead, we do what real ObjC compilers do, which is way faster. For more details, see objr
- Smart pointers that provide global ARC inference. Like ARC, you don't need to write manual retain/release calls. Unlike ARC, the compiler usually doesn't need to write them either, meaning lower runtime memory management cost than even native code. For more details, see objr.
- Runtime autorelease eliding, which keeps your objects out of autoreleasepools. For more details, see objr.
- Pointer packing for optional types so they fit in a
u64. For more details, see objr - Stack-allocated blocks. For more details, see blocksr
- Safe APIs. Where possible APIs are designed with safe abstractions to provide familiar guarantees to Rust developers
- Async bindings out of the box for shader compilation and similar tasks
- Low-level. These bindings assume familiarity with bound APIs and are not documented separately. For details on how they work, see the native documentation.
- Free for noncommercial or "small commercial" use.
Generally it's implemented enough that you can write basic high-performance rendering applications.
The following APIs are at least partially implemented. These implementations are incomplete but contain common functions or "the ones I use".
The objr macro system makes it very ergonomic to add new bindings for specific missing features or new Metal APIs.
- MTLDevice
- MTLCommandBuffer
- MTLCommandQueue
- MTLBuffer
- MTLRenderPassAttachmentDescriptor
- MTLRenderPassColorAttachmentDescriptor
- MTLRenderPassColorAttachmentDescriptorArray
- MTLRenderPassDepthAttachmentDescriptor
- MTLRenderPassDescriptor
- MTLRenderPipelineDescriptor
- MTLRenderPipelineState
- MTLRenderPipelineColorAttachmentDescriptor
- MTLRenderPipelineColorAttachmentDescriptorArray
- MTLBlitCommandEncoder
- MTLRenderCommandEncoder
- MTLTexture
- MTLTextureDescriptor
- MTLDepthStencilDescriptor (primarily depth APIs)
- MTLDepthStencilState
- MTLPixelFormat
- MTLPrimitiveType
- MTLOrigin
- MTLSize
- MTLDrawable
Not yet implemented:
- Compute
- iOS
- Compiling shaders at build-time. You can compile at runtime with this API (see tests), or write a
build.rsscript to build your shaders. Stay tuned for future crates!