Installation

Requirements

• Rust stable (recent version recommended)
• A supported GPU

Adding Goldy to Your Project

[dependencies]
goldy = "0.1"

Or with cargo:

cargo add goldy

Feature Flags

Platform-inappropriate features are no-ops — enabling metal on Linux or dx12 on macOS compiles cleanly but does nothing.

To build with only specific backends:

[dependencies]
goldy = { version = "0.1", default-features = false, features = ["vulkan"] }

Shader Toolchain

Goldy uses Slang as its shader language. The Slang compiler is bundled automatically via slang-rs — no separate SDK install is needed. Shaders are compiled at runtime to the appropriate target (SPIR-V, DXIL, or Metal IR).

Verifying Installation

use goldy::{Instance, DeviceType};

fn main() -> anyhow::Result<()> {
    let instance = Instance::new()?;

    println!("Available GPUs:");
    for adapter in instance.enumerate_adapters() {
        println!("  {} ({:?})", adapter.name, adapter.device_type);
    }

    let device = instance.create_device(DeviceType::DiscreteGpu)?;
    println!("\nUsing: {}", device.adapter_info().name);

    Ok(())
}

cargo run

Expected output:

Available GPUs:
  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (DiscreteGpu)
  Intel(R) UHD Graphics 770 (IntegratedGpu)

Using: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti

Backend Selection

Goldy selects the best backend for your platform automatically:

Override at runtime with GOLDY_BACKEND:

GOLDY_BACKEND=vulkan cargo run

Platform-Specific Setup

Windows

DX12 is used by default and requires no additional setup. For the Vulkan backend, install the Vulkan SDK. Ensure your GPU drivers are up to date.

Linux

Install Vulkan development packages:

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install libvulkan-dev vulkan-tools

# Fedora
sudo dnf install vulkan-loader-devel vulkan-tools

# Arch
sudo pacman -S vulkan-icd-loader vulkan-tools

macOS

Goldy uses the native Metal backend — no MoltenVK or Vulkan SDK needed. Ensure macOS 12+ and Xcode command-line tools are installed:

xcode-select --install

Windowing (for examples)

The examples use winit for windowing:

[dev-dependencies]
winit = "0.30"
anyhow = "1.0"

Next Steps

• Your First Triangle — draw a colored triangle
• Your First Compute Shader — write pixels from compute