wgpu-igniter

Library wrapper on top of winit and wgpu to quickly bootstrap simple wgpu projects.

Used technologies: Rust, winit, wgpu, WebAssembly, WebGPU.

Convention choices

• coordinate system is left-handed
• triangle front face is counter clock wise

How to run

A default example is loaded as the main binary. It can be launched with:

cargo run

Numerous examples are available in the examples directory:

cargo run --example cube_shader_transition

In order to check if the launcher panics at simple executions, a headless mode exists used by tests. It can be enabled by using the HEADLESS environment variable:

HEADLESS=true cargo run

To test the main app and all examples compile and run without an immediate crash:

cargo test

How to use

The main element is the wgpu_igniter::RenderLoopHandler trait, for which an implementation must be provided to wgpu_igniter::launch_app.

All methods have a default implementation, to avoid cluttering your code with unused methods, and also because a plugin mechanism may already provide the implementation you need.

use wgpu_igniter::{launch_app, RenderLoopHandler, LaunchContext};

fn main() {
    launch_app(|c: LaunchContext| Box::new(MainScenario::new(c)));
}

struct MainScenario {
    // Your elements
}

impl MainScenario {
    pub fn new(ctx: LaunchContext) -> Self {
        // Prepare your objects
        MainScenario {}
    }
}

impl RenderLoopHandler for MainScenario {

    // To react to some input or winit window events
    fn on_mouse_event(&mut self, event: &DeviceEvent) {}
    fn on_keyboard_event(&mut self, event: &KeyEvent) {}
    fn on_window_event(&mut self, event: &WindowEvent) -> EventState {
        EventState::default()
    }

    // Called once at startup
    fn on_init(&mut self, plugin_registry: &mut PluginRegistry, draw_context: &mut DrawContext) {}

    // Called in the render loop
    fn on_update(
        &mut self,
        plugin_registry: &mut PluginRegistry,
        draw_context: &mut DrawContext,
        time_info: &TimeInfo,
    ) {
    }
    fn on_render(
        &mut self,
        plugin_registry: &mut PluginRegistry,
        draw_context: &DrawContext,
        time_info: &TimeInfo,
        render_pass: &mut wgpu::RenderPass<'static>,
    ) {
    }

}

Current plugins

The goal of this library is to allow implementation at the low level, with less WebGPU boilerplate. Default implementations for recurrent patterns are provided:

• egui: ease integration of the egui framework for simple GUI
• scene_3d: management of camera and scene graph for 3D scenes
• canvas: ready-to use canvas for fragment shader effects, with default uniforms like the one provided by the ShaderToy website

WASM version

For the web version, you must be sure you can compile to the WebAssembly target first:

rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
cargo install -f wasm-bindgen-cli

If you have Python3 installed, you can compile to WASM and host a local web server by launching the command:

./run-web.sh

... then launch a browser with the displayed URL.

Note

For now, examples cannot be launched like that. Only the default example is launched.

References

I heavily read and used:

• Learn WGPU tutorial.
• WebGPU Fundamentals

Mains references links are:

• https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu
• https://www.w3.org/TR/webgpu
• https://www.w3.org/TR/WGSL

Having a look to some wasm-compatible examples did helped a lot too.

TODO

• Load gltf models
• Allow usage of webgl shaders
• Replicate ShaderToys shader features
• Usage of compute shader with output usable by vertex/fragment shaders
• Composition of various shader stages

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025 Vincent Hiribarren

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.