apple-metal-rs

Safe Rust bindings for Apple's Metal framework on macOS, backed by a Swift bridge in the screencapturekit-rs style.

apple-metal 0.6.0 now covers:

• device discovery and capability queries
• buffers, textures, texture views, buffer-backed textures, and IOSurface zero-copy interop
• command queues/buffers plus explicit blit, compute, and render encoders
• MSL compilation, functions, compute pipeline state, and render pipeline state
• heaps, events, shared events, dynamic libraries, binary archives, argument encoders, indirect command buffers, acceleration-structure handles, visible / intersection function tables, counter sample buffers, log state, residency sets, and capture scopes

See COVERAGE.md for the audited SDK matrix and the deferred families that are still intentionally out of scope for this crate release. MetalFX and MetalPerformanceShaders are separate frameworks and are not part of apple-metal.

Quick start

use apple_metal::{resource_options, MetalDevice};

let device = MetalDevice::system_default().expect("no Metal-capable GPU");
println!("{} (registry id {})", device.name(), device.registry_id());

let _queue = device.new_command_queue().expect("command queue");
let buffer = device
    .new_buffer(4096, resource_options::STORAGE_MODE_SHARED)
    .expect("shared buffer");
println!("allocated {} bytes", buffer.length());

Zero-copy from IOSurface

With the default iosurface feature:

# #[cfg(feature = "iosurface")]
# fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
use apple_metal::{IOSurfaceMetalExt, MetalDevice};
use apple_cf::iosurface::IOSurface;

let device = MetalDevice::system_default().unwrap();
let surface: IOSurface = todo!("get one from ScreenCaptureKit / AVFoundation / etc");
let texture = surface.create_metal_texture(&device, 0).unwrap();
println!("{}x{} MTLTexture", texture.width(), texture.height());
# Ok(()) }
# #[cfg(not(feature = "iosurface"))] fn main() {}

Examples

• 01_get_device — create the default Metal device and print basic identity.
• 02_caps_buffer_texture — inspect device capabilities, allocate buffers, and create textures.
• 03_command_buffer_blit — submit a simple blit copy on the GPU.
• 04_compute_shader — compile MSL source and dispatch a compute kernel.
• 05_render_and_explicit_encoders — exercise explicit blit, compute, and render encoders in one program.
• 06_resources_and_archives — use argument encoders, heaps, log state, dynamic libraries, and binary archives.
• 07_advanced_objects — touch shared events, fences, counters, indirect command buffers, residency sets, and capture scopes.

Run one directly with:

cargo run --example 05_render_and_explicit_encoders

Status

• Audited against the active Xcode Metal SDK headers (MacOSX26.2.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/Metal.framework/Headers).
• COVERAGE.md tracks implemented, partial, and deferred Metal families.
• The crate continues to prefer safe, synchronous handle wrappers over raw Objective-C messaging from Rust.