sola-raylib

sola-raylib is an actively maintained Rust bindings and wrapper for raylib 5.5. It currently targets Rust toolchain version 1.78 or higher.

• View the project on crates.io: https://crates.io/crates/sola-raylib
• View the docs: https://docs.rs/sola-raylib/latest/sola_raylib/

Versioning: sola-raylib's major version tracks raylib's major version — 5.x binds raylib 5.5, 6.x will bind raylib 6.0, and so on. Minor and patch numbers are sola-raylib's own (raylib doesn't follow strict semver, so this project doesn't try to mirror it beyond the major).

This project is a fork of github.com/raylib-rs/raylib-rs from commit 91bcb492c61dc067945d59357ca6def0d83fcb2c (v5.5.1 release), which was a fork of github.com/deltaphc/raylib-rs.

Check out the examples directory to find usage examples.

sola-raylib development happens on main. Be sure to view the tag version of the repository if you're wanting to find details on a specific version.

The latest released version on crates.io in this SHA is 5.5.3.

Features / Bugs

Though this binding tries to stay close to the simple C API, it makes some changes to be more idiomatic for Rust.

• Resources are automatically cleaned up when they go out of scope (or when std::mem::drop is called). This is essentially RAII. This means that "Unload" functions are not exposed (and not necessary unless you obtain a Weak resource using make_weak()).
• Most of the Raylib API is exposed through RaylibHandle, which is for enforcing that Raylib is only initialized once, and for making sure the window is closed properly. RaylibHandle has no size and goes away at compile time. Because of mutability rules, Raylib-rs is thread safe!
• A RaylibHandle and RaylibThread are obtained through through the init() function which will allow you to build up some window options before initialization (replaces set_config_flags). RaylibThread should not be sent to any other threads, or used in a any syncronization primitives (Mutex, Arc) etc.
• Manually closing the window is unnecessary, because CloseWindow is automatically called when RaylibHandle goes out of scope.
• Model::set_material, Material::set_shader, and MaterialMap::set_texture methods were added since one cannot set the fields directly. Also enforces correct ownership semantics.
• Font::from_data, Font::set_chars, and Font::set_texture methods were added to create a Font from loaded CharInfo data.
• SubText and FormatText are omitted, and are instead covered by Rust's string slicing and Rust's format! macro, respectively.

Installation

Supported Platforms

sola-raylib is focused on supporting Windows, Linux, macOS, and Web targets.

The table below shows which core APIs are supported for which platforms:

Build Dependencies

Requires glfw, cmake, and curl. Tips on making things work smoothly on all platforms is appreciated. Follow instructions for building raylib for your platform here

1. Add the dependency to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
sola-raylib = "5.5"

Then in your code, use it as sola_raylib:

use sola_raylib::prelude::*;

Drop-in replacement for raylib-rs

If you're migrating an existing raylib-rs project and don't want to touch every use raylib::... statement, use Cargo's package rename so the crate is still imported as raylib in your source code:

[dependencies]
raylib = { package = "sola-raylib", version = "5.5" }

With that line, all your existing raylib code keeps working. The ./examples in this repository use this style.

2. Start coding!

use sola_raylib::prelude::*;

fn main() {
    let (mut rl, thread) = sola_raylib::init()
        .size(640, 480)
        .title("Hello, World")
        .build();

    while !rl.window_should_close() {
        let mut d = rl.begin_drawing(&thread);

        d.clear_background(Color::WHITE);
        d.draw_text("Hello, world!", 12, 12, 20, Color::BLACK);
    }
}

Cross-compiling using cross

Cross compiling with sola-raylib can be made easier with cross. See the upstream raylib-rs wiki for a writeup that should still largely apply.

Tech Notes

• Structs holding resources have RAII/move semantics, including: Image, Texture2D, RenderTexture2D, Font, Mesh, Shader, Material, and Model.
• Wave, Sound, Music, and AudioStream have lifetimes bound to AudioHandle.
• Functions dealing with string data take in &str and/or return an owned String, for the sake of safety. The exception to this is the gui draw functions which take &CStr to avoid per frame allocations. The rstr! macro helps make this easy.
• In C, LoadFontData returns a pointer to a heap-allocated array of CharInfo structs. In this Rust binding, said array is copied into an owned Vec<CharInfo>, the original data is freed, and the owned Vec is returned.
• In C, LoadDroppedFiles returns a pointer to an array of strings owned by raylib. Again, for safety and also ease of use, this binding copies said array into a Vec<String> which is returned to the caller.
• Linking is automatic, though I've only tested on Windows 10, Ubuntu, and MacOS 15. Other platforms may have other considerations.
• OpenGL 3.3, 2.1, and ES 2.0 may be forced via adding ["opengl_33"], ["opengl_21"] or ["opengl_es_20] to the features array in your Cargo.toml dependency definition.

Drop ordering

Resources like Texture2D, RenderTexture2D, Font, Model, Mesh, and Shader hold GPU handles and free them in their Drop impl. RaylibHandle's Drop calls CloseWindow(), which tears down the GL context. GPU resources must drop before the RaylibHandle — otherwise their unload calls run against a dead context and segfault.

Rust drops local variables in reverse declaration order, and struct fields in declaration order. So if you hold both resources and RaylibHandle in the same struct, declare rl last:

struct Engine {
    // resources (dropped first, while the GL context is still alive)
    texture: Texture2D,
    rt: RenderTexture2D,
    // handle (dropped last -> CloseWindow runs after resources are unloaded)
    thread: RaylibThread,
    rl: RaylibHandle,
}

The same rule applies when rl and resources are locals in the same function: declare rl first so it drops last.

Audio resources (Wave, Sound, Music, AudioStream) are lifetime-bound to RaylibAudio, so the borrow checker enforces their ordering for you — no discipline required.

Building from source

1. Clone repository: git clone --recurse-submodules
2. cargo build

If building for Wayland on Linux

1. Install these packages:
   libglfw3-dev wayland-devel libxkbcommon-devel wayland-protocols wayland-protocols-devel libecm-dev
2. Enable wayland by adding features=["wayland"] to your dependency definition

Note that the packages may not be a comprehensive list, please add details for your distribution or expand on these packages if you believe this to be incomplete.

Extras

• In addition to the base library, there is also a convenient ease module which contains various interpolation/easing functions ported from raylib's easings.h, as well as a Tween struct to assist in using these functions.
• Equivalent math and vector operations, ported from raymath.h, are impled on the various Vector and Matrix types. Operator overloading is used for more intuitive design.

Contribution & Support

Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for more details.

See DEVELOPING.md for how to work with this repo locally.