ANGLE provides OpenGL ES 3.1 and EGL 1.5 libraries and tests. You can use these to build and run OpenGL ES applications on Windows, Linux, Mac and Android.
ANGLE uses git for version control. Helpful documentation can be found at http://git-scm.com/documentation.
Note: If you are building inside a Chromium checkout see these instructions instead.
Required on all platforms:
- Python 3 must be available in your path.
- depot_tools
- Required to download dependencies (with gclient), generate build files (with GN), and compile ANGLE (with ninja).
- Ensure
depot_tools
is in your path as it provides ninja for compilation.
- For Googlers, run
download_from_google_storage --config
to login to Google Storage before fetching the source.
On Windows:
- IMPORTANT: Set
DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN=0
in your environment if you are not a Googler. - Install Visual Studio Community 2022
- Install the Windows SDK.
- You can install it through Visual Studio Installer if available. It might be necessary to switch to the
Individual components
tab to find the latest version. - The currently supported Windows SDK version can be found in vs_toolchain.py.
- The SDK is required for GN-generated Visual Studio projects, the D3D Debug runtime, and the latest HLSL Compiler runtime.
- You can install it through Visual Studio Installer if available. It might be necessary to switch to the
- (optional) See the Chromium Windows build instructions for more info.
On Linux:
- Dependencies will be handled later (see
install-build-deps.sh
below).
On MacOS:
- XCode for Clang and development files.
- For Googlers on MacOS, you'll first need authorization to download macOS SDK's from Chromium
servers before running
gclient sync
. Obtain this authorization viacipd auth-login
and following the instructions.
mkdir angle
cd angle
fetch angle
If you're contributing code, you will also need to set up the Git commit-msg
hook. See ContributingCode#getting-started-with-gerrit for instructions.
On Linux only, you need to install all the necessary dependencies before going further by running this command:
./build/install-build-deps.sh
After this completes successfully, you are ready to generate the ninja files:
gn gen out/Debug
If you had trouble checking out the code, please inspect the error message. As
a reminder, on Windows, ensure you set DEPOT_TOOLS_WIN_TOOLCHAIN=0
in
your environment if you are not a Googler. If you are a Googler, ensure you
ran download_from_google_storage --config
.
GN will generate ninja files. The default build options build ANGLE with clang
and in release mode. Often, the default options are the desired ones, but
they can be changed by running gn args out/Debug
. Some options that are
commonly overriden for development are:
is_component_build = true/false (false forces static links of dependencies)
target_cpu = "x64"/"x86" (the default is "x64")
is_debug = true/false (use false for release builds. is_debug = true is the default)
angle_assert_always_on = true/false (enables release asserts and runtime debug layers)
is_clang = false (NOT RECOMMENDED) (to use system default compiler instead of clang)
For a release build run gn args out/Release
and set is_debug = false
.
Optionally set angle_assert_always_on = true
for Release testing.
On Windows, you can build for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) by setting
target_os = "winuwp"
in the args. Setting is_component_build = false
is
highly recommended to support moving libEGL.dll and libGLESv2.dll to an
application's directory and being self-contained, instead of depending on
other DLLs (d3dcompiler_47.dll is still needed for the Direct3D backend). We
also recommend using is_clang = false
with UWP.
For more information on GN run gn help
.
Use autoninja
to compile on all platforms with one of the following commands:
autoninja -C out/Debug
autoninja -C out/Release
depot_tools
provides autoninja
, so it should be available in your path
from earlier steps. Ninja automatically calls GN to regenerate the build
files on any configuration change. autoninja
automatically specifies a
thread count to ninja
based on your system configuration.
In addition, we highly recommend Google employees use goma, a distributed compilation system. Detailed information is available internally. To enable Goma set the GN arg:
use_goma = true
To generate the Visual Studio solution in out/Debug/angle-debug.sln
:
gn gen out/Debug --sln=angle-debug --ide=vs2022
In Visual Studio:
- Open the ANGLE solution file
out/Debug/angle-debug.sln
. - We recommended you use
autoninja
from a command line to build manually. - "Build Solution" from the IDE is broken with GN. You can use the IDE to build one target or one file at a time.
Once the build completes, all ANGLE libraries, tests, and samples will be located in out/Debug
.
See the Android specific documentation.
This sections describes how to use ANGLE to build an OpenGL ES application.
ANGLE can use a variety of backing renderers based on platform. On Windows, it defaults to D3D11 where it's available, or D3D9 otherwise. On other desktop platforms, it defaults to GL. On mobile, it defaults to GLES.
ANGLE provides an EGL extension called EGL_ANGLE_platform_angle
which allows uers to select
which renderer to use at EGL initialization time by calling eglGetPlatformDisplayEXT with special
enums. Details of the extension can be found in its specification in
extensions/EGL_ANGLE_platform_angle.txt
and extensions/EGL_ANGLE_platform_angle_*.txt
and
examples of its use can be seen in the ANGLE samples and tests, particularly util/EGLWindow.cpp
.
To change the default D3D backend:
- Open
src/libANGLE/renderer/d3d/DisplayD3D.cpp
- Locate the definition of
ANGLE_DEFAULT_D3D11
near the head of the file, and set it to your preference.
To remove any backend entirely:
- Run
gn args <path/to/build/dir>
- Set the appropriate variable to
false
. Options are:
angle_enable_d3d9
angle_enable_d3d11
angle_enable_gl
angle_enable_metal
angle_enable_null
angle_enable_vulkan
angle_enable_essl
angle_enable_glsl
On Windows:
- Configure your build environment to have access to the
include
folder to provide access to the standard Khronos EGL and GLES2 header files.
- For Visual C++
- Right-click your project in the Solution Explorer, and select Properties.
- Under the Configuration Properties branch, click C/C++.
- Add the relative path to the Khronos EGL and GLES2 header files to Additional Include Directories.
- Configure your build environment to have access to
libEGL.lib
andlibGLESv2.lib
found in the build output directory (see Building ANGLE).
- For Visual C++
- Right-click your project in the Solution Explorer, and select Properties.
- Under the Configuration Properties branch, open the Linker branch and click Input.
- Add the relative paths to both the
libEGL.lib
file andlibGLESv2.lib
file to Additional Dependencies, separated by a semicolon.
- Copy
libEGL.dll
andlibGLESv2.dll
from the build output directory (see Building ANGLE) into your application folder. - Code your application to the Khronos OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL 1.4 APIs.
On Linux and MacOS, either:
- Link you application against
libGLESv2
andlibEGL
- Use
dlopen
to load the OpenGL ES and EGL entry points at runtime.
In addition to OpenGL ES and EGL libraries, ANGLE also provides a GLSL ES
translator. The translator targets various back-ends, including HLSL, GLSL
for desktop and mobile, SPIR-V and Metal SL. To build the translator, build
the angle_shader_translator
target. Run the translator binary without
arguments to see a usage message.
The translator code is included with ANGLE but fully independent; it resides
in src/compiler
. Follow the steps above for
getting and building ANGLE to build the translator on
the platform of your choice.
The ANGLE shader_translator
sample demos basic C++ API usage. To translate a GLSL ES shader, call the following
functions in the same order:
sh::Initialize()
initializes the translator library and must be called only once from each process using the translator.sh::ContructCompiler()
creates a translator object for vertex or fragment shader.sh::Compile()
translates the given shader.sh::Destruct()
destroys the given translator.sh::Finalize()
shuts down the translator library and must be called only once from each process using the translator.