SDL2 + WebGPU C++ Template

This is a template repo to get started with WebGPU C++ projects targetting both native and WebAssembly builds. Easily build apps and then test and deploy native binaries or to the web with Webpack. The web build is live here!

Building for Web

The C++ code is compiled with Emscripten to WebAssembly, and uses CMake for build configuration. Both need to be installed and in your path to build the project. You can then run from the repo root directory:

mkdir cmake-build
cd cmake-build
emcmake cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
make -j 8

This will build the C++ code with Emscripten to produce the WebAssembly build of the C++ code, and JavaScript files to import the Wasm into an app and from a worker thread. The build command will also copy these files into ./web/src/cpp/ to be used by the web app.

See the web build CI job for more information if you encounter issues.

Running the Web App

The app is a small TypeScript shim that sets up the WebGPU device and calls into the Wasm module to run main to start the app. After building the C++ code, you can run the app:

cd web
npm i
npm run serve

You can then visit localhost:8080 in the browser to see the app running.

Building for Native

Native builds use Dawn to provide an implementation of WebGPU, Dawn is fetched and built using a modified version of Elie Michel's FetchDawn CMake script. The sdl2webgpu library is used to setup a cross platform WebGPU context for SDL2. You can build the native application via CMake. After installing SDL2 (and libx11-xcb-dev on Ubuntu for Dawn), you can build the native app via:

mkdir cmake-build-native
cd cmake-build-native
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
make -j 8

The app can then be run:

./src/wgpu_app

On Windows, if you've instaled SDL2 through vcpkg you can build as shown below. The var ${env:VCPKG_INSTALLATION_ROOT} should be set to the root directory of your vcpk install.

mkdir cmake-build-native
cd cmake-build-native
cmake -A x64 .. `
  -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" `
  -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="${env:VCPKG_INSTALLATION_ROOT}/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake"
cmake --build . --config relwithdebinfo -j 8

The app can then be run:

.\src\RelWithDebInfo\wgpu_app.exe

See the native build CI job for more information if you encounter issues.