Sursface

Sursface is a small cross-platform rendering library designed to simplify the development of WebGPU applications, without compromising developer control.

It builds upon well-established APIs (wgpu and winit) to wrap over the core lifecycle operations of a graphical app, while re-exposing the full capabilities of these APIs unchanged. Sursface's goal is to enable writing plain WebGPU code with less hassle.

Supported Platforms

• Cross-Platform Desktop: Compile and run on Linux or Windows.
• WASM: Automatically generate JavaScript bindings for the wasm32-unknown Nix target, making your apps trivially embeddable into webpages.

Features

• Ready-made WebGPU Surface: Sursface provides the entrypoint to your graphical app by supplying a platform window configured to be used as a surface by wgpu.
• Event Loop: Sursface abstracts away the specifics of the event loop, whether it's running on desktop or in the browser. You simply need to provide the function pointer to your frame-by-frame logic, and Sursface will regularly call it for you.
• No New Tech: Once the setup is done, keep using wgpu as if sursface wasn't there.
• Default Logic (WIP): Sursface will offer opt-in shortcuts for some elementary operations through simple functions, further reducing graphical boilerplate.

Building Sursface

Prerequisites

To compile Sursface, ensure you have the following tools installed: Rust, Cargo, and optionally Nix (recommended).

Installation

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/boralg/sursface.git
cd sursface

Building with Cargo

You can compile Sursface on your native platform using Cargo:

cargo build --release

Building with Nix

To build a binary inside the Nix store, ready to run locally:

nix build .

Cross-Compiling with Nix

Sursface supports cross-compilation to various targets. Here are some examples:

nix build .#x86_64-linux
nix build .#x86_64-windows
nix build .#wasm32-unknown

Releases

Releases consist of executable binaries of the examples. These are automatically built by a pipeline on every push to main, and can be directly downloaded, unzipped, and ran, without any installation process.

Running Examples

Examples can also be run directly with cargo:

cargo run --bin <example_name>

For instance:

cargo run --bin hello_triangle