gleed-ash

A Vulkan game engine written in Rust, with a small test game on top of it. It is a Rust rewrite of my previous C++ engine using Claude: SDL3 for window, input and surface, glam instead of GLM, gpu-allocator instead of VMA, and shaders written in Slang. The original C++ engine was 100% handwritten.

Workspace

• vk: the only entry point to Vulkan. Reexports what we use from ash and adds raii, a thin wrapper with automatic drop.
• engine: the engine itself (device, swapchain, renderer, meshes, input).
• game: the executable. Uploads two meshes and moves the camera.

Requirements

• Rust (edition 2024).
• A GPU and driver with Vulkan 1.4.
• Vulkan SDK, which also provides slangc (needed at build time) and the validation layers (enabled in debug builds).
• SDL3: SDL3.lib for linking and SDL3.dll next to the executable. As an alternative, add the build-from-source feature to sdl3 in engine/Cargo.toml and SDL is built along with the project.

Running

cargo run           # debug, with validation layers
cargo run --release

Or just press F5 and be happy with VSCode debugger.

Shaders in engine/src/shaders/ are compiled to SPIR-V by engine/build.rs on every build; slangc.sh does the same thing outside cargo.