Can you use Vulkano interchangeably with Ash

[LouChiSoft]

Forgive me if this is not the right place to ask but I could not find any information about it online. I come from a C/C++ background where Vulkan is entirely low level and fully verbose. I understand that Vulkano takes a more rustic approach to things and offers a higher (if not high) level of abstraction for Vulkan. I see in the source that Vulkano uses Ash to do this and wondered if it's possible for a user to be able to use Vulkano in most places, but when they need extra control use Ash directly for more control?

[Rua]

In principle, yes you can. But you have to ensure that Vulkano and Ash don't fight with each other or violate the Vulkan specification. In practice this means that you usually want some object to be managed by either Vulkano or Ash, because Vulkano may rely on certain invariants that could be violated by direct Ash calls. That isn't to say you should never do this, just be aware of the pitfalls; Vulkano is written to assume you're using Vulkano alone.

Someone is currently working on implementing #1935, which should help users who want to use both together. If you think other API additions would be useful for this, feel free to propose them or make a PR that implements them.

[LouChiSoft]

Thanks for the reply, the PR you listed with direct API communication between Vulkano and Ash is very along the lines of the sort of thing I was hoping for (although I now realise I didn't communicate that well). I will certainly be watching it and looking into what sort of API suggestions might be worth making

[pac85]

This is the DOC for the trait that allows to access ash objects link

The PR is needed to create vulkano objects from ash objects. You might not need it.

[LouChiSoft]

As you say I might not need it. But coming from a C/C++ background the idea of creating the various ash objects and then the Vulkano objects from that is somewhat more appealing to me that the other way around 😂. I will certainly trying both directions however to get a feel