tycho/gloam

Gloam is a tool for game engine developers and graphics programmers that generates the "glue code" needed to talk to graphics APIs like Vulkan, OpenGL, and OpenGL ES. When you build a game or graphics application, your code needs to load specific functions from the computer's graphics driver at runtime. This loader code is tedious to write and maintain by hand, so this tool reads the official specification files and automatically generates the required C code for you. You run the tool from your command line, telling it which graphics APIs you want to support and which versions. It produces a set of C source and header files that you drop directly into your project. These files handle all the heavy lifting of finding and loading the graphics driver's functions. Once integrated, you can call graphics functions in your own code just as if they were standard built-in functions, and the generated code quietly routes those calls to the correct place in the driver. The main appeal is its speed and small footprint. The tool is designed to load only the specific graphics functions your application actually needs to use, rather than loading everything available. This makes the initialization process extremely fast and keeps the size of your compiled application much smaller than it would be with comparable loaders. The generated code is also completely deterministic, meaning if you run the tool twice with the same inputs, the output will be perfectly identical, making it safe to track in version control. This project is built for developers who care deeply about performance and predictability, particularly in game engines or other high-performance 3D applications. It offers a specialized mode for Vulkan that lets developers load functions based exactly on what they enabled when setting up their graphics context, entirely skipping slow driver queries. The README highlights that this approach is dramatically faster and produces much smaller files than older, more traditional methods.