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SDL2 WebGPU Extension

This is an extension for the great SDL2 library for using it with WebGPU native. It was written as part of the Learn WebGPU for native C++ tutorial series.

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Usage
• Example
• License

Overview

This extension simply provides the following function:

WGPUSurface SDL_GetWGPUSurface(WGPUInstance instance, SDL_Window* window);

Given an SDL window, SDL_GetWGPUSurface returns a WebGPU surface that corresponds to the window's backend. This is a process that is highly platform-specific, which is why I believe it belongs to SDL.

Usage

Your project must link to an implementation of WebGPU (providing webgpu.h) and of course to SDL. Then:

Option A If you use CMake, you can simply include this project as a subdirectory with add_subdirectory(sdl2webgpu) (see the content of CMakeLists.txt).

Option B Just copy sdl2webgpu.h and sdl2webgpu.c to your project's source tree. On MacOS, you must add the compile option -x objective-c and the link libraries -framework Cocoa, -framework CoreVideo, -framework IOKit, and -framework QuartzCore. For iOS, do similarly but use -framework UIKit instead of -framework Cocoa.

Example

Thanks to this extension it is possible to simply write a fully cross-platform WebGPU hello world:

#define SDL_MAIN_HANDLED
#include "sdl2webgpu.h"
#include <SDL2/SDL.h>
#include <webgpu/webgpu.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
    // Init WebGPU
    WGPUInstanceDescriptor desc;
    desc.nextInChain = NULL;
    WGPUInstance instance = wgpuCreateInstance(&desc);

    // Init SDL
    SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO);
    SDL_Window *window = SDL_CreateWindow("Learn WebGPU", SDL_WINDOWPOS_UNDEFINED, SDL_WINDOWPOS_UNDEFINED, 640, 480, 0);

    // Here we create our WebGPU surface from the window!
    WGPUSurface surface = SDL_GetWGPUSurface(instance, window);
    printf("surface = %p", surface);

    // Wait for close
    SDL_Event event;
    while (1)
        while (SDL_PollEvent(&event))
            if (event.type == SDL_QUIT)
                break;
    // Terminate SDL
    SDL_DestroyWindow(window);
    SDL_Quit();

    return 0;
}

NB The linking process depends on the implementation of WebGPU that you are using. You can find detailed instructions for the wgpu-native implementation in this Hello WebGPU chapter. You may also check out examples/CMakeLists.txt.

License

See LICENSE.txt.