Using Vulkan without linking to it. (volk alternative for vulkan.hpp)

Instead of using the full fledged Vulkan SDK, we only can use the Vulkan-headers package and load actual Vulkan implementation from the driver.

To do this, we need to enable vulkan.hpp dynamic dispatcher by default by setting VULKAN_HPP_DISPATCH_LOADER_DYNAMIC to 1, adding VULKAN_HPP_DEFAULT_DISPATCH_LOADER_DYNAMIC_STORAGE to the source file and updating VULKAN_HPP_DEFAULT_DISPATCHER as we load in more Vulkan features.

#define VULKAN_HPP_DISPATCH_LOADER_DYNAMIC 1
#include "vulkan/vulkan.hpp"

// Vulkan defined macro storage for dispatch loader
VULKAN_HPP_DEFAULT_DISPATCH_LOADER_DYNAMIC_STORAGE

int main()
{
    vk::DynamicLoader dl;
    PFN_vkGetInstanceProcAddr vkGetInstanceProcAddr = dl.getProcAddress<PFN_vkGetInstanceProcAddr>("vkGetInstanceProcAddr");
    VULKAN_HPP_DEFAULT_DISPATCHER.init(vkGetInstanceProcAddr);
    vk::Instance instance = vk::createInstance({}, nullptr);
    // initialize function pointers for instance
    VULKAN_HPP_DEFAULT_DISPATCHER.init(instance);
    // create a dispatcher, based on additional vkDevice/vkGetDeviceProcAddr
    std::vector<vk::PhysicalDevice> physicalDevices = instance.enumeratePhysicalDevices();  
    vk::Device device = physicalDevices[0].createDevice({}, nullptr);
    // function pointer specialization for device
    VULKAN_HPP_DEFAULT_DISPATCHER.init(device);
}

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Using Vulkan without linking to it. (volk alternative for vulkan.hpp)

Mark Nefedov

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