Vulkan Square Rotation

A simple ~10'000 lines C Vulkan application that renders a rotating square (6.5k utilities, 3.5k Vulkan). Created while exploring the Vulkan API.

Demonstration

Features

Custom C utilities Framework (c-utilities)

Built on top of a personal standard library framework, focusing on my safety rules:

• Overflow-safe mathematics - Preventing undefined behavior during memory size calculations.
• Cross-platform file I/O - Robust file reading utility with UTF-8 path support, Windows long path handling, and safe memory bound checks for reliably loading SPIR-V shaders on almost any OS.
• Safe memory allocators - Array-bound checking allocators and portable aligned memory allocators ensuring Vulkan's strict memory requirements are met without vulnerabilities.
• Custom assertions and cleanup - Formatted assertions (assert_mf) and atexit-based cleanup wrappers guarantee leak-free termination even on fatal errors.

c-utilities on GitHub

Multithreaded rendering

The main event loop and the rendering loop are decoupled. Render commands are executed on a dedicated thread with mutex and condition variable synchronization, pausing automatically when the window is minimized so as not to burn the CPU/GPU cycles.

Deferred resource destruction

Implements a custom static ring-buffer-based deletion queue. Old swapchains, image views, and framebuffers are safely deferred for deletion until they are no longer used by the GPU, preventing synchronization errors.

Advanced Memory Management

• Implements a custom memory type selection algorithm that prioritizes device-local memory and intelligently falls back based on hardware heaps.
• Uses persistently mapped uniform buffers with strict alignment calculations and manual vkFlushMappedMemoryRanges for efficient CPU-to-GPU data transfer without unmapping overhead.

Asynchronous Data Transfer

Detects and utilizes a dedicated transfer queue family, if it's available, for uploading vertex and index buffers via staging buffers, keeping the graphics queue free for rendering.

Robustness and error recovery

Automatically handles catastrophic states like device or surface loss by attempting to recreate the logical device and surface on the fly without crashing or leaking memory.

Efficient view update

View and projection matrices are cached and recomputed only when the window is resized or the projection is marked dirty, avoiding per-frame matrix recalculation.

Imageless framebuffer and present fences usage

Uses VK_KHR_imageless_framebuffer for reduced memory overhead and faster framebuffer creation; VK_EXT_swapchain_maintenance1 for proper seamless swap chain recreation and present scaling.

Debug tooling

Integrates VK_EXT_debug_utils with validation layers to provide detailed runtime error reporting and performance warnings in debug build.

Requirements

• c-utilities (custom safe C libraries: safe math, safe memory allocation, aligned memory, file I/O, etc.)
• Vulkan-enabled GPU and driver (no MacOS support, VK_KHR_PORTABILITY_ENUMERATION_EXTENSION_NAME would be needed; if you have MacOS to test, contact me on EleisonNox@proton.me)
• GCC compiler
• C11 or C17 standard support
• make utility
• Libraries:
  • GLFW
  • cglm (C linear algebra)
  • pthread
  • Vulkan (includes glslc shader compiler)

Build

At the top of the Makefile, set the variables to match your environment:

PATH_TOOLCHAIN	= Path/to/the/toolchain
PATH_VULKAN		= Path/to/VulkanSDK

Then build with:

make		# release build
make debug	# debug build with validation layers

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License: Apache-2.0 license