zig-metal - Zig Bindings to the Metal API

This library is currently in alpha stage, don't use it in any serious projects!

Bindings are automatically generated using zig and libclang, but there are still some issues with the code generation. The source code for the generator can be found here: https://github.com/dmbfm/zig-metal-gen.

In the examples folder you can find a few samples which were directly translated from apple's metal-cpp samples.

Usage

Copy or clone zig-metal to a subdirectory of your project. For instance, if you copy it to libs/zig-metal you should add this to your build.zig:

const zig_metal = @import("libs/zig-metal/build.zig");

pub fn build(b: *std.Build) void {
    ...

    const zig_metal_pkg = zig_metal.package(b);
    zig_metal_pkg.link(exe);

    exe.linkFramework("Foundation");
    exe.linkFramework("Metal");
    exe.linkFramework("AppKit");    // If on macOS
    exe.linkFramework("MetalKit");  // If using MTKView
    ...
}

What is included

All of the metal API and parts of the Foundation API which Metal depends on can are directly imported in the root zig-metal namespace, so you can access them via @import("zig-metal").MTLDevice, @import("zig-metal").NSString, etc.

Additionally some basic AppKit bindings can be found in the extras.appkit namespace, and basic MetalKit bindings in the extras.metalkit namespace.

Examples

You can find some usage examples in the examples folder. These are translations from Apple's samples for metal-cpp.

1. Window sample: zig build run-window

2. Primitive sample: zig build run-primitive

3. Argument Buffer sample: zig build run-argbuffers

4. Animation sample: zig build run-animation

5. Instancing sample: zig build run-instancing

6. Perspective sample: zig build run-perspective

7. Lighting sample: zig build run-lighting

8. Texturing sample: zig build run-texturing

9. Compute sample: zig build run-compute

10. Compute to render sample: zig build run-compute-to-render