Sokol is a C hardware abstraction layer and cross-platform graphics library designed for managing windowing, input, and audio across different operating systems. It functions as a GPU resource manager and multimedia application framework, providing a unified API for rendering 2D and 3D graphics across WebGL, Metal, Direct3D, and OpenGL.
The project is distinguished by its single-header implementation, which simplifies integration and portability. It utilizes a stateless render pass definition and a one-update-per-frame model to synchronize CPU data to GPU memory and manage resource lifecycles through descriptor structures.
Its broader capability surface includes GPU compute programming via compute shaders, asynchronous data fetching for files and network requests, and callback-driven audio streaming. The framework also covers system integration tasks such as user input processing, command line argument parsing, and the integration of immediate-mode user interfaces.
Additional tooling is provided for observability, including memory allocation tracking, frame statistics, and high-resolution execution time measurement.