I Tried Coding my own Graphics Library

Sebastian Lague has been experimenting with a homegrown graphics and compute library built on Vulkan, turning the project into a hands-on tour of low-level rendering infrastructure. The work spans the usual early hurdles—initialization, swapchain setup, and getting a blank window on screen—before moving into meshes, buffers, shaders, and the first successful triangle.

From there, the library grows into more engine-like territory: push constants, 3D model rendering with perspective projection, instancing, and compute shaders. That progression matters because it mirrors the path many teams take when moving beyond toy renderers and into systems that can support real content and data-driven workflows.

The project also includes an API layer and bindings, plus testing and bug fixing, which is where custom graphics work often becomes less about drawing pixels and more about managing complexity. For developers building engines, tools, or rendering experiments, this is a useful reminder that Vulkan’s power comes with a lot of explicit setup, synchronization, and validation work.

The broader value here is educational: a small, self-contained library can expose the tradeoffs behind modern rendering architecture far more clearly than a black-box engine. Even if most teams won’t ship their own graphics abstraction, the same lessons apply when designing render backends, compute pipelines, or editor-facing rendering tools.