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Daxa Tutorial

Installing dependencies

This guide walks you through installing the tools you need for Daxa development on Windows and Linux. If you’re experienced with Vulkan or C++, you may already have some of these tools.

Windows

1. Visual Studio

We’ll use the Visual Studio compiler on Windows (instead of Clang) due to current issues with Clang on Windows. You can install Visual Studio from the official website. Make sure you select the “Desktop development with C++” component during the setup.

2. Clang & Ninja

  1. Install Chocolatey (Windows package manager) from an elevated (administrator) PowerShell session:

    Terminal window
    Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; `
    [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = `
    [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; `
    iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

  2. Install LLVM (Clang) and Ninja

    Terminal window
    choco install llvm
    choco install ninja

3. Misc Tools

Install the following:

Download each installer from their official site and follow the wizard to complete installation.

4. Vulkan SDK

Download the Vulkan SDK for Windows. During installation, uncheck “Debuggable Shader API Libraries” to avoid conflicts with glslang.

Linux

1. Install Basic Tools

Terminal window
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ninja-build clang cmake git

2. Vulkan SDK

Follow the LunarG Vulkan SDK Installation Guide for detailed steps on your distribution.

Terminal window
wget -qO- https://packages.lunarg.com/lunarg-signing-key-pub.asc | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/lunarg.asc
sudo wget -qO /etc/apt/sources.list.d/lunarg-vulkan-noble.list http://packages.lunarg.com/vulkan/lunarg-vulkan-noble.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install vulkan-sdk

If you’re using another distribution, see LunarG’s official instructions.

Installing VSCode (Windows & Linux)

We’ll use Visual Studio Code as our code editor for the tutorial. Other IDEs (e.g., CLion) can also work, but the instructions may differ. For a smoother experience, use VSCode with the following extensions:

  1. C/C++ Extension Pack (ms-vscode.cpptools-extension-pack)
  2. GLSL Lint (dtoplak.vscode-glsllint)

You’re now ready to set up your Daxa development environment. Next, we’ll walk through configuring VSCode and creating your first Daxa project.