I built a small GPU shader visualization tool as a first hands-on endeavour in the world of Rust graphics and hardware acceleration.

The simplicity of this project demonstrates quite well the power of using wgpu as a graphics abstraction: the application can make use of different graphics APIs to target all platforms with a relatively small codebase. I would even imagine that it would have taken me more time to write this application only targeting one of the low level APIs like Vulkan.

Another library I made use of is naga, a shader translation facility integrated in wgpu that made it easy to add support for shading languages like WGSL as well as GLSL without worrying too much about their differences. I found that it is also a useful tool to learn more about shading languages in general since it also has a CLI to convert shaders from one language to the other, which helped me compare the syntax of the two languages quickly.

I'm happy to see that the wgpu project is becoming the de-facto library for hardware-accelerated graphics in Rust as there are clear benefits to having readily available cross-platform graphics infrastructure. It also has a lot of significance to me as it was the first open-source project I contributed to, just two years ago at the age of 16. The maintainers helpfully welcomed my naive contribution, and I ended up using the API that I had introduced back then into this new project.