PApabs3·Aug 23, 2021Submission
Open Shading Language – Advanced shading language for production GI renderers
54 points · Open discussionAcademySoftwareFoundation
OpenShadingLanguage
C++2012–2021
AcademySoftwareFoundation / OpenShadingLanguage
OpenShadingLanguage
Advanced shading language for production GI renderers
6Distinct people
6Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
2.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Advanced shading language for production GI renderers
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
I love the community of languages that have adopted LLVM as a back-end: http://llvm.org/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#external-open-source-... Pure, FAUST, Julia, Clay are all very…
msutherl used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2012-12-21 16:31:52 UTC to 2021-08-23 05:26:42 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesWhere the Open Shading Language has been used
2 points · Open discussionIndeed, there is no shortage of open source ray tracers and renderers. That said, there are very few open source renderers with full OSL (https://github.com/imageworks/OpenShadingLanguage) support and the required features for animation and VFX works. I actually know only two (both actively developed): Cycles and appleseed.
In Appleseed – open-source physically-based rendering engineAs someone who works in the industry developing software, it's because for the high-end VFX studios, software like Blender and Natron just don't cut it in terms of efficiency, power and flexibility.
Artist time costs more money than software licenses do, and as the open source software isn't generally good enough for their needs, using better off-the-shelf software that have fairly decent and flexible plugin APIs is good enough for them.
A lot of the code VFX studios have is proprietary (as in unique to the individual studio who wrote it) plugins for host apps like Maya, Katana and Nuke, and shaders/integrators for renderers like PRMan and Arnold.
There are open source projects that are used for glue in the VFX industry:
https://github.com/alembic/alembic
https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/OpenSubdiv
https://github.com/imageworks/Op
Read the rest
enShadingLanguage
https://github.com/ImageEngine/gaffer
https://github.com/dreamworksanimation/openvdb
https://github.com/openexr/openexr
But these have almost exclusively been internal proprietary projects started within studios that have been open-sourced, to help transfer assets between studios, and are mostly open file formats for images, volumes and geometry, as well as other intermediate tooling.
> This is one of the very few successful projects that used LLVM to accelerate a dynamic language.
Yup. Another is Open Shading Language[0]. They ended up with performance 25% faster than the previous shaders, which were coded by hand in C. It's used now in Blender's "Cycles" renderer. Yay, open source!
[0] https://github.com/imageworks/OpenShadingLanguage/
In Introducing the WebKit FTL JITI love the community of languages that have adopted LLVM as a back-end: http://llvm.org/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#external-open-source-...
Pure, FAUST, Julia, Clay are all very promising and I didn't know about Open Shading Language or Portable OpenCL.
[1] http://code.google.com/p/pure-lang/
[2] http://faust.grame.fr/
[3] http://julialang.org/
[4] http://claylabs.com/clay/
[5] https://github.com/imageworks/OpenShadingLanguage/
[6] http://pocl.sourceforge.net/
In LLVM and Clang 3.2 released