Homebrew 3DS SDK fully written in Zig

GasInfinity · October 8, 2025, 3:50pm

Hi! Lurker over here for quite some time that finally decided to sign up

I’ve been working these last few months in a homebrew 3DS SDK fully written in everyone’s favourite programming language, Zig. I must say, being able to literally go from zero to something is quite amazing as with a C-based setup I’d need to setup complex cross-compilers and use make, cmake (which I despise both) or meson (somewhat better imo).

Some cool features that are currently implemented or in progress include a full graphics api acting as a GPU driver, a shader assembler for the GPU shader ISA, a comptime IPC command packer and unpacker, a lot of services implemented on top of the IPC layer, multiple tools related to the 3DS and many more things that I may not remember

It can currently be used as-is but I’m waiting for zig 0.16 to release (even if it takes months) so I can take advantage of the juicy new Io interface to make the standard library as useful as possible for downstream users. After that I’ll make a proper release with as much docs as possible.

This is my first proper “big” OSS project, any amount of feedback is welcome!

floooh · October 8, 2025, 4:05pm

I must say I really like your API design

github.com/GasInfinity/zitrus

demo/mango/hello_triangle/src/main.zig

134e576d3


      
          // A lot of this state can be dynamic. TODO: Docs
          const simple_pipeline = try device.createGraphicsPipeline(.{
              .rendering_info = &.{
                  .color_attachment_format = .a8b8g8r8_unorm,
                  .depth_stencil_attachment_format = .undefined,
              },
              .vertex_input_state = &.init(&.{
                  .{
                      .stride = @sizeOf(Vertex),
                  },
              }, &.{
                  .{
                      .location = .v0,
                      .binding = .@"0",
                      .format = .r8g8_sscaled,
                      .offset = 0,
                  },
              }, &.{}),
              // This must be a 'ZPSH' shader binary assembled by zitrus.
              .vertex_shader_state = &.init(position_vtx, "main"),

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GasInfinity · October 8, 2025, 4:19pm

Thanks! It’s very heavily inspired by vk as I love how powerful it can be, even though it can be quite verbose sometimes