Caleb Cornett's comments:
"A few weeks ago, Alex added a partial Metal API to SDL2:
https://hg.libsdl.org/SDL/rev/22c8e7cd8d38
I noticed it was missing a few features that would help Metal become a
first-class citizen in SDL, so I went ahead and wrote them! Here are the new
APIs:
1. SDL_WINDOW_METAL flag for SDL_CreateWindow(). This allows the programmer
to specify that they intend to create a window for use with SDL_MetalView.
The flag is used to ensure correct usage of the API and to prevent
accidentally defaulting to OpenGL on iOS.
2. SDL_Metal_GetLayer(). This function takes a SDL_MetalView and returns a
pointer to the view's backing CAMetalLayer. This simplifies things
considerably, since in the current version of the SDL_Metal API the
programmer is required to bridge-cast a SDL_MetalView handle to an NSView or
UIView (depending on the platform) and then extract the layer from there.
SDL_Metal_GetLayer automatically handles all of that, making the operation
simple and cross-platform.
3. SDL_Metal_GetDrawableSize(). This function already exists in the current
SDL_Metal API (and is used behind-the-scenes for SDL_Vulkan_GetDrawableSize
on Apple platforms) but was not publicly exposed. My patch exposes this
function for public use. It works just like you'd expect.
Tested on macOS 10.14 and iOS 12.4."
Fixes Bugzilla #4796.
Dzmitry Malyshau
Current code, search paths, and error messages are written to only consider MoltenVK on macOS as a Vulkan Portability implementation. It's not the only implementation available to the users. gfx-portability [1] has been shown to run a number of titles well, including Dota2, Dolphin Emulator, and vkQuake3, often out-performing MoltenVK in frame rate and stability (see Dolphin benchmark [2]).
There is no reason for SDL to be that specific, it's not using any MVK-specific functions other than the WSI initialization ("VK_MVK_macos_surface"). gfx-portability exposes this extension as well, and a more generic WSI extension is in process. It would be good if SDL was written in a more generic way that expect a Vulkan Portability library as opposed to MoltenVK specifically.
[1] https://github.com/gfx-rs/portability
[2] https://gfx-rs.github.io/2019/03/22/dolphin-macos-performance.html
This tries to load vulkan.framework or libvulkan.1.dylib before MoltenVK.framework
or libMoltenVK.dylib. In the previous version, layers would not work for applications
run-time loading the default library.
SDL now builds with gcc 7.2 with the following command line options:
-Wall -pedantic-errors -Wno-deprecated-declarations -Wno-overlength-strings --std=c99
