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Shaderc rs

Rust bindings for the shaderc library.

From google·Updated May 28, 2026·View on GitHub·

This is not an official Google product (experimental or otherwise), it is just code that happens to be owned by Google. The project is written primarily in Rust, distributed under the Apache License 2.0 license, first published in 2017. Key topics include: compiler, glsl, graphics, hlsl, rust-bindings.

shaderc-rs

Version
Documentation

Rust bindings for the shaderc library.

Disclaimer

This is not an official Google product (experimental or otherwise), it is just
code that happens to be owned by Google.

Usage

The included shaderc-sys crate uses build.rs to
discover or build a copy of shaderc libraries. See Setup section.

First add to your Cargo.toml:

toml
[dependencies] shaderc = "0.10"

Then add to your crate root:

rust
extern crate shaderc;

Documentation

shaderc provides the Compiler interface to compile GLSL/HLSL
source code into SPIR-V binary modules or assembly code. It can also assemble
SPIR-V assembly into binary module. Default compilation behavior can be
adjusted using CompileOptions. Successful results are kept in
CompilationArtifacts.

Please see
Documentation
for detailed documentation.

Example

Compile a shader into SPIR-V binary module and assembly text:

rust
use shaderc; let source = "#version 310 es\n void EP() {}"; let mut compiler = shaderc::Compiler::new().unwrap(); let mut options = shaderc::CompileOptions::new().unwrap(); options.add_macro_definition("EP", Some("main")); let binary_result = compiler.compile_into_spirv( source, shaderc::ShaderKind::Vertex, "shader.glsl", "main", Some(&options)).unwrap(); assert_eq!(Some(&0x07230203), binary_result.as_binary().first()); let text_result = compiler.compile_into_spirv_assembly( source, shaderc::ShaderKind::Vertex, "shader.glsl", "main", Some(&options)).unwrap(); assert!(text_result.as_text().starts_with("; SPIR-V\n"));

Setup

shaderc-rs needs the C++ shaderc library.
It's shipped inside the Vulkan SDK.
You may be able to install it directly on some Linux distro's using the package
manager. The C++ shaderc project provides artifacts
downloads
. You can also
build it from source.

The order of preference in which the build script
attempts to obtain native shaderc can be controlled by several options, which
are passed through to shaderc-sys when building shaderc-rs:

  1. Building from source, if option --features build-from-source is specified.
  2. If the SHADERC_LIB_DIR environment variable is set to
    /path/to/shaderc/libs/, that path will be searched for native dynamic or
    static shaderc library.
  3. If the VULKAN_SDK environment variable is set, then $VULKAN_SDK/lib will
    be searched for native dynamic or static shaderc library.
  4. If pkg-config is available, use it to find the path to search for libraries.
  5. On Linux, system library paths like /usr/lib/ will additionally be searched
    for native dynamic or shaderc library, if the SHADERC_LIB_DIR is not set.
  6. Building from source, if the native shaderc library is not found via the
    above steps.

For each library directory, the build script will try to find and link to the
dynamic native shaderc library shaderc/shaderc_shared first and the static
native shaderc library shaderc_combined next. To prefer searching for the
static library first and the dynamic library next, the option
--features prefer-static-linking may be used.

Building from Source

The shaderc-sys build.rs will automatically
check out and compile a copy of native C++ shaderc and link to the generated
artifacts, which requires git, cmake, and python existing in the PATH:

  • CMake
  • Git
  • Python (only works with Python 3, on Windows
    the executable must be named python.exe)
  • a C++11 compiler

Additionally:

  • Ninja is required on
    windows-msvc, but optional on all other platforms.

These requirements can be either installed with your favourite package manager
or with installers from the projects' websites. Below are some example ways
to get setup.

windows-msvc Example Setup

  1. rustup default stable-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc
  2. Install Build Tools for Visual Studio 2022.
    If you have already been using this toolchain then its probably already
    installed.
  3. Install the necessary tools as listed in the above and add their paths
    to the PATH environment variable.

windows-gnu Example Setup

windows-gnu toolchain is not supported but you can instead cross-compile to
windows-gnu from windows-msvc.

  1. Run the command: rustup default stable-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc
  2. Run the command: rustup target install x86_64-pc-windows-gnu
  3. Install Build Tools for Visual Studio 2022.
    If you have already been using this toolchain then its probably already
    installed.
  4. Install msys2, following ALL of the instructions.
  5. Then in the msys2 terminal run: pacman --noconfirm -Syu mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake mingw-w64-x86_64-make mingw-w64-x86_64-python3 mingw-w64-x86_64-ninja
  6. Add the msys2 mingw64 binary path to the PATH environment variable.
  7. Any cargo command that builds the project needs to include
    --target x86_64-pc-windows-gnu e.g. to run: cargo run --target x86_64-pc-windows-gnu

Linux Example Setup

Use your package manager to install the required dev-tools

For example on ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake git ninja-build python3

On Arch linux, you can directly install the shaderc package.

macOS Example Setup

Assuming Homebrew:

brew install git cmake ninja python@3.12

Contributions

This project is licensed under the Apache 2 license. Please see
CONTRIBUTING before contributing.

Authors

This project is initialized and mainly developed by Lei Zhang
(@antiagainst).

Contributors

Showing top 12 contributors by commit count.

View all contributors on GitHub →

This article is auto-generated from google/shaderc-rs via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 6/25/2026