--- title: NoGraphicsAPI ships: Vulkan in 61 lines, MIT licensed description: Seb Aaltonen released NoGraphicsAPI, a minimalist low-level Vulkan 1.4 wrapper aiming to strip away boilerplate from modern graphics API usage. The full API... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/nographicsapi-ships-vulkan-in-61-lines-mit-licensed-qtt985kn6 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: NoGraphicsAPI ships: Vulkan in 61 lines, MIT licensed | daily.dev og:description: Seb Aaltonen released NoGraphicsAPI, a minimalist low-level Vulkan 1.4 wrapper aiming to strip away boilerplate from modern graphics API usage. The full API... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/nographicsapi-ships-vulkan-in-61-lines-mit-licensed-qtt985kn6 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/qTt985kn6.png og:image:alt: NoGraphicsAPI ships: Vulkan in 61 lines, MIT licensed og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # NoGraphicsAPI ships: Vulkan in 61 lines, MIT licensed **[Trends](https://daily.dev/sources/trends)** · 2 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Seb Aaltonen released NoGraphicsAPI, a minimalist low-level Vulkan 1.4 wrapper aiming to strip away boilerplate from modern graphics API usage. The full API surface is about 750 lines and the implementation around 4,500 lines, with ported examples dramatically shorter than their raw Vulkan counterparts (a VkTriangle port at 61 lines vs the original, VkCube at 236 lines). It leans on modern Vulkan features like Buffer Device Addresses, descriptor heaps, and unified image layouts, and notably the author spent days after release trimming lines rather than adding them. Jonathan Blow and Omar Cornut both amplified the announcement. It's MIT licensed and the community reception is early but positive. ## Content Seb Aaltonen shipped [NoGraphicsAPI](https://github.com/SebAaltonen/NoGraphicsAPI) over the weekend: a MIT-licensed, low-level Vulkan 1.4 wrapper built around the latest extensions (buffer device addresses, descriptor heaps, device address commands, unified image layouts). The goal is to get as close as possible to his "No Graphics API" blog post and upcoming SIGGRAPH 26 talk — basically, strip Vulkan down to what modern hardware actually needs instead of what the spec historically required. The numbers are the story. VkTriangle ported to NoGraphicsAPI: 61 lines, roughly 10% of the original. VkCube: 236 lines, about 5%. A full deferred rendering example with G-buffer, lighting, compute shader simulation, and mesh shader rendering clocks in at 365 lines — half the size of the original VkTriangle alone. The API itself sits at 750 lines, with around 500 of those being texture formats and enums (there are a lot of them). Implementation is 4,500 lines. Aaltonen spent three days after release aggressively cutting: "Been removing thousands of lines from NoGraphicsAPI examples, implementation and API." The direction is clearly toward minimal surface area, not feature completeness. The reception caught him off guard. 931 stars and 27 forks in two days, over a weekend, with issues and PRs already coming in. "I didn't realize how much demand there's for a minimal GPU API," he wrote. "I thought NoGraphicsAPI is a curiosity, because the hardware coverage is lacking." Jonathan Blow and Dear ImGui's Omar Cornut both retweeted the release, which probably helped. Hardware coverage is the real caveat. Handheld AMD drivers don't yet support the latest Vulkan extensions — desktop-only for now. The ROG Ally can't run it. Steam Deck can (Mesa has the extensions), but it's out of stock in Finland. Aaltonen notes Valve has done solid work keeping Mesa current. Development is moving fast: task shader support landed shortly after release, with a minimal API change (pass task shader bytecode to the mesh PSO). His prototype game saw 27% faster shadow map rendering after moving viewport culling from mesh shader to task shader. Timestamp query API is also in, and he says it "puts a smile on my face." The demand signal is real. Whether the hardware coverage catches up fast enough to matter is the open question. ## Questions this post answers ### What is NoGraphicsAPI and how much code does it save compared to raw Vulkan? NoGraphicsAPI is a low-level Vulkan 1.4 wrapper by Seb Aaltonen with a 750-line API surface and a 4,500-line implementation. Ported examples shrink dramatically: the VkTriangle example is 61 lines (about 10% of the original Vulkan version), and VkCube is 236 lines (about 5% of the original). It relies on modern Vulkan features like Buffer Device Addresses, descriptor heaps, and unified image layouts, and is MIT licensed. _Graphics programmers evaluating leaner Vulkan tooling can follow releases like this one on daily.dev._ ### What license is NoGraphicsAPI released under? NoGraphicsAPI is released under the MIT license, meaning there is minimal friction to adopting it in commercial or open source projects. It was created by Seb Aaltonen and has drawn attention from figures like Jonathan Blow and Dear ImGui author Omar Cornut, who both amplified the announcement. _Developers choosing a graphics API abstraction can weigh licensing and adoption signals via daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [No Graphics API — Sebastian Aaltonen](https://daily.dev/posts/no-graphics-api-sebastian-aaltonen-bwui0vx4m) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#game-development](https://daily.dev/tags/game-development), [#c++](https://daily.dev/tags/c++), [#vulkan](https://daily.dev/tags/vulkan), [#graphics-programming](https://daily.dev/tags/graphics-programming) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/nographicsapi-ships-vulkan-in-61-lines-mit-licensed-qtt985kn6) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"NoGraphicsAPI ships: Vulkan in 61 lines, MIT licensed","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/nographicsapi-ships-vulkan-in-61-lines-mit-licensed-qtt985kn6","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/nographicsapi-ships-vulkan-in-61-lines-mit-licensed-qtt985kn6"},"datePublished":"2026-09-07T02:50:06.087Z","dateModified":"2026-09-12T15:03:26.655Z","description":"Seb Aaltonen released NoGraphicsAPI, a minimalist low-level Vulkan 1.4 wrapper aiming to strip away boilerplate from modern graphics API usage. 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