Nannou: Creative Coding Toolkit for Rust

Just fyi, we are closely watching both wgpu-rs and rendy and will continue to do so over the next couple of months. Vulkano has been a mission to use to say the least, maintainership is dwindling (most of the recent PRs are from us), and the Rust graphics landscape has changed quite a bit since we made the decision to use it almost a year ago. Both wgpu and rendy seem like strong contenders for the future of nannou's graphics, but we probably won't go down that road for a couple more nannou releases at least while we focus on some other areas.

We're particularly interested in rendy's render graph [1] approach to a higher-level, near-zero-cost API. Are there plans for something similar in wgpu?

Also, I realise that wgpu is web-first, but I'd be curious to get your thoughts on its potential for use in native applications for installations and projection mapping - e.g. will it be possible to spawn multiple swapchains for multiple windows? Or will it be purely focused on a single window web experience?

Anyway, we'll do another post soon about our thoughts on the future of graphics in nannou, just wanted to let you know you're on our minds :)

[1]: https://github.com/amethyst/rendy#rendergraph

Delaying with decision to adopt Rendy or wgpu-rs is reasonable: both are still maturing, and are in the early adopter phase.

> We're particularly interested in rendy's render graph [1] approach to a higher-level, near-zero-cost API. Are there plans for something similar in wgpu?

No, this would not ever be in wgpu (or feasible on top of WebGPU in general), since it's providing safety at lower level, and there is no way to get near-zero-cost there.

Saying that, I'm not sure what the bottlenecks of your use-case are. Do you plan on submitting a lot of different work on GPU, i.e. heavily use command recording on CPU (as opposed to relying on GPU instances), to the point of being sensitive to CPU performance? My expectation from a creative coding framework would be that zero-cost is not the foremost priority.

> will it be possible to spawn multiple swapchains for multiple windows? Or will it be purely focused on a single window web experience?

Yes, I think this is already possible in wgpu-rs, although nobody tested multi-windows yet. In general, we put heavy focus on native usage.

Looking forward to your post!

To learn about the different techniques and mostly to get to know the basics I cannot recommend enough the amazing Daniel Shiffman ( https://twitter.com/shiffman/ ) and his awesome "The Coding Train" video series on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman

I usually do not release the code for my dailies, but I'm getting a few of them ready to include as examples for nannou, there's a PR with one example already up. I'm also always open to talk about the "how" I did something and to give you a pseudo-code version of what I'm using.