In principle (should be double-checked), the Vulkan SDK is only required when compiling the library. Since all users need to compile Datoviz for now, they need the SDK. Otherwise, the only thing they'd need is a Vulkan-compatible graphics driver.

Once we build a binary package, either with pip or conda, the Python package will come with the libdatoviz shared library compiled for a given platform (.so/.dll/.dylib), as well as the Cython compiled binding module (pxd/pyx files). The shared library will also have some dynamic dependencies (especially if it was compiled with ffmpeg support, which is totally optional). Depending on the platform, we'll have to make sure these dependencies match between the compilation platform and the target user platform.

In practice, the compiled Datoviz library has few dependencies. Most dependencies (eg the Vulkan SDK, glfw3, etc) are statically linked at compile time, so they are bundled into the shared library and they don't need to be installed by the user. ffmpeg is the main exception, it needs to be handled separately.

Long story short, making robust cross-platform binary packages of Datoviz that are pip- and conda- installable with no effort from the user is definitely possible, it requires some work by the developers and package managers, but not by the end-user. Once the library is a bit more mature, the goal is definitely to have a Python library that is as easy to install as NumPy/SciPy/matplotlib etc (who have similar issues with a lot of low-level code in C and other languages).

In conda, perhaps it would make sense to have two separate packages: one that isn't Python-specific (libdatoviz?) and that could be reused by other wrappers in different languages, and one with just the Cython bindings. At the moment the Cython module uses dynamic linking (I initially tried static linking but I had some issues).

I have no experience with conda-forge but it would be awesome if it was able to build binary packages for all platforms automatically.

Python bindings #13

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