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 0.6.3 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/render pipeline state, and descriptor-driven compute/render/tile pipeline creation
• depth/stencil state, sampler state, and descriptor-driven argument encoders
• MetalFX spatial / temporal scaler support plus the broader MetalFX base / denoised / frame-interpolator symbol families
• heaps, events, shared events, dynamic libraries, binary archives, indirect command buffers, acceleration-structure handles, visible / intersection function tables, counter sample buffers, log state, residency sets, and capture scopes
• exhaustive top-level symbol coverage for the audited macOS Metal.framework + MetalFX.framework headers, including descriptor, reflection, render-pass, resource-state, rasterization-rate, tensor, IO, and MTL4* / MTL4FX* families

See COVERAGE.md for the audited SDK matrix and the note on which families are exercised by the focused integration tests versus the broader audited symbol wrappers. MetalPerformanceShaders remains out of scope for this crate.

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.