xgpu

xgpu is an aggressively typed, red-squiggle-free Python binding of wgpu-native, autogenerated from the upstream C headers.

Not 'production ready'.

Install

Wheels are built for Mac (x86 only), Windows, and Linux for Python 3.7+:

pip install xgpu

Motivation

Why another webgpu/wgpu_native binding when wgpu-py already exists and is semi-mature?

• Typing: xgpu takes full advantage of Python type annotations, enabling quality of life features like IDE autocomplete for enum values
• Up to date: xgpu is 99% autogenerated from the headers, and aims to always be in sync with the latest wgpu-native release
• Performance: xgpu is substantially faster than wgpu

Conventions/Philosophy

xgpu is a mostly 1-to-1 binding of webgpu.h (+wgpu.h from wgpu-native).

General name conventions

xgpu largely tries to maintain the names from webgpu.h rather than localizing them into Python's conventions.

• Names keep their formatting from webgpu.h but lose WGPU prefixes: WGPUTextureSampleType -> TextureSampleType
• Fields: WGPUAdapterProperties.vendorName -> AdapterProperties.vendorName
• Member functions: wgpuDeviceHasFeature -> Device.hasFeature
• Enum values: WGPUTextureUsage_CopySrc -> TextureUsage.CopySrc
  • Names invalid in Python are prefixed with "_": WGPUBufferUsage_None -> BufferUsage._None, WGPUTextureDimension_2D -> TextureDimension._2D

Struct constructors

webgpu.h requires constructing various structs, for example WGPUExtent3D. These can be created in two ways:

# Recommended: create explicit initialized struct (note lowercase name)
extents = xgpu.extent3D(width = 100, height = 100, depthOrArrayLayers = 1)

# Alternative: create 0-initialized struct and then mutate values
extents = xgpu.Extent3D()
extents.width = 100
extents.height = 100
extents.depthOrArrayLayers = 1

Member functions

As a C API, webgpu.h follows typical C convention for member functions, which is to define them like:

uint32_t wgpuTextureGetHeight(WGPUTexture texture)

In xgpu these become genuine member functions, e.g.,

class Texture:
    def getHeight(self) -> int

Array arguments / fields

Some webgpu.h functions and structs take arrays using the convention of passing first the array item count, and then the array pointer, e.g.,

void wgpuQueueSubmit(WGPUQueue queue, size_t commandCount, WGPUCommandBuffer const * commands)

typedef struct WGPUPipelineLayoutDescriptor {
    // ...
    size_t bindGroupLayoutCount;
    WGPUBindGroupLayout const * bindGroupLayouts;
} WGPUPipelineLayoutDescriptor;

These are translated to take lists:

class Queue:
  def submit(self, commands: List[CommandBuffer]])

def pipelineLayoutDescriptor(*, bindGroupLayouts: List["BindGroupLayout"])

Enums and Flags

Enums are translated into IntEnums:

mode = xgpu.AddressMode.MirrorRepeat
print(int(mode))  # 2
print(mode.name)  # "MirrorRepeat"

mode = xgpu.AddressMode(2)
print(mode.name)  # "ClampToEdge"

Some enums are meant to be ORed together into bitflags. These can be combined in the natural way:

usage = xgpu.BufferUsage.MapRead | xgpu.BufferUsage.CopyDst
print(usage) # prints: 9

This works because IntEnums inherit all the int methods include bitwise operations; however, this discards the type information. A slightly more annoying but type-safer way is:

usage = xgpu.BufferUsage.MapRead.asflag() | xgpu.BufferUsage.CopyDst
print(usage) # prints: BufferUsage.MapRead | BufferUsage.CopyDst

You can also create typed flags from bare ints:

usage = xgpu.BufferUsageFlags(0b1001)
print(usage) # prints: BufferUsage.MapRead | BufferUsage.CopyDst

You can test for a particular flag with the python in operator:

has_map_read = xgpu.BufferUsage.MapRead in mybuffer.getUsage()

Callbacks

Callbacks must be explicitly wrapped in the appropriate callback type:

def my_adapter_cb(status: xgpu.RequestAdapterStatus, gotten: xgpu.Adapter, msg: str):
    print(f"Got adapter with msg:'{msg}', status: {status.name}")

cb = xgpu.RequestAdapterCallback(my_adapter_cb)

Chained structs

The webgpu.h structure chaining convention is represented by ChainedStruct, whose constructor takes a list of Chainable and automatically creates the linked chain.

shader_source = """..."""
shader = device.createShaderModule(
    nextInChain=xgpu.ChainedStruct(
      [xgpu.shaderModuleWGSLDescriptor(code=shader_source)]
    ),
    hints=[],
)

Byte buffers, void pointers

xgpu has two translations for void *: VoidPtr represents a pointer to opaque data (e.g., a window handle) while DataPtr represents a pointer to a sized data structure (e.g., texture data you want to upload).

For example,

# Note use of VoidPtr.NULL and VoidPtr.raw_cast
surf_desc = xgpu.surfaceDescriptorFromWindowsHWND(
    hinstance=xgpu.VoidPtr.NULL,
    hwnd=xgpu.VoidPtr.raw_cast(self.window_handle),
)

# DataPtr.wrap can wrap anything supporting the 'buffer' interface
bytedata = bytearray(100)
wrapped = xgpu.DataPtr.wrap(bytedata)

queue.writeBuffer(
  buffer=some_buffer, 
  bufferOffset=0,
  data=wrapped
)

# This includes numpy arrays
my_array = np.ones(100, dtype=np.float32)
wrapped = xgpu.DataPtr.wrap(my_array)

Codegen/Local Build

You will need bun to run the codegen. Deno might work but just go ahead and install bun. You will also need to have ruff and cffi installed in python (pip install ruff cffi).

Then:

python codegen/fetch_wgpu_bins.py
bun codegen/generate.ts
cd xgpu
python _build_ext.py
cd ..
pip install .