This solution of using Vulkan is good in my case, since we already have a Vulkan Library that I can port, and the process of porting is not all that complex since Vulkan was made to be portable. Most of the code should be able to be ported copy-and-paste style. This will save a lot of time since I only have a few more weeks of working on Gateware, and I would like to have 3D graphics for my presentation. Now getting MoltenVK onto a cross-platform project isn't as straight-forward as I would like, but it isn't too complex. We use Vulkan for macOS in much the same way so my first thought was to copy the process to link to MoltenVK on macOS to the iOS target, but this is unfortunately not possible. Since iOS doesn't have support for Vulkan, you cannot just place Vulkan code in an app and expect it to work. You need to also package MoltenVK in your app bundle for the Vulkan code to work properly.
The next step was to get MoltenVK for iOS. I had thought that you could reuse the macOS files for this, but that was incorrect. LunarG provides macOS files for MoltenVK, but I needed iOS files, so I went to the Github repository to build the library myself. This turned out to be a big waste of time. Although I did build the surprisingly easy to build the library, it takes quite a long time, around 10 hours on my old Macbook for both iOS and iOS Simulator. On top of long build times, it turns out that the files that LunarG provides actually contain the .dylib and .xcframework files for iOS and iOS Simulator. This revelation made me realize I spent 3 days building a library that I already had built 3 days earlier.
Now that I had the files that I needed, I could get to properly getting MoltenVK into the iOS app bundle. This is where I am running into issues. For macOS, we are looking into the default location for libraries and linking to a .dylib file. Although possible with an iOS project, this isn't ideal since there is no easy way to ensure that the user's iOS device has MoltenVK installed. As such, I need to link another way. This is where the lovely documentation for MoltenVK shines. They have 2 ways to link that would work. I could link to the .dylib file and copy it to the app bundle and change 8 paths in build settings for that target, or I could copy the .xcframework file and change a single build setting. I opted for the .xcframework route for simplicity. From there I could run Vulkan code.
At the moment I am working on making a CMake script that automates this process for future developers on Gateware working on iOS. I am having a bit of trouble but that will be it for this post.
Now that I had the files that I needed, I could get to properly getting MoltenVK into the iOS app bundle. This is where I am running into issues. For macOS, we are looking into the default location for libraries and linking to a .dylib file. Although possible with an iOS project, this isn't ideal since there is no easy way to ensure that the user's iOS device has MoltenVK installed. As such, I need to link another way. This is where the lovely documentation for MoltenVK shines. They have 2 ways to link that would work. I could link to the .dylib file and copy it to the app bundle and change 8 paths in build settings for that target, or I could copy the .xcframework file and change a single build setting. I opted for the .xcframework route for simplicity. From there I could run Vulkan code.
At the moment I am working on making a CMake script that automates this process for future developers on Gateware working on iOS. I am having a bit of trouble but that will be it for this post.
References:
MoltenVK Github Repo
LunarG MoltenVK Download
https://vulkan.lunarg.com/doc/sdk/1.1.130.0/mac/via.html
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