glslang

Newer editions of Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware Software Interface covers GPUs [1] Multiflow still has some relevant ideas [2] Programming on Parallel Machines: GPU, Multicore, Clusters and More. Gives you a look at some of the issues [3] SPIRV-VM is a virtual machine for executing SPIR-V shaders [4] NyuziRaster: Optimizing Rasterizer Performance and Energy in the Nyuzi Open Source GPU [5] Ocelot is a modular dynamic compilation framework for heterogeneous systems, providing various backend targets for CUDA programs and analysis modules for the PTX virtual instruction set. [6] glslang is the Khronos-reference front end for GLSL/ESSL, partial front end for HLSL, and a SPIR-V generator. [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83895.Computer_Organizat... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiflow [3]: http://heather.cs.u

Generic types are probably one of the biggest ones. GLSL has generic builtins, but you can't define your own. But besides that, HLSL's support and management of buffers and bindings is a great deal saner than GLSL's. Especially the new syntax for loading structures from a ByteAddressBuffer. Beats the craziness that is SSBOs and image load/store. GLSL's upbringing with integrated texture/samplers is a bit ridiculous in a separable texture/sampler world, like in Vulkan. You need to create an integrated texture/sampler with the sampler2D constructor, and then immediately use it. The GLSL spec specifically says you can't pass it to your own user-created functions, I'm guessing because they didn't trust platform vendors to write working compilers? But glslang checks for it too, despite being the only GLSL compiler in the toolchain: https://git

I have an actual real-world use case for this :) Shader-cross-compilation for 3D frameworks: https://floooh.github.io/2017/05/15/oryol-spirv.html I'm hooking python scripts as custom-build-jobs into C/C++ projects which (for instance) takes care of compiling GLSL shader code into HLSL (D3D), MSL (Metal) and various GLSL versions (for GLES2, GLES3 and desktop GL). Khronos provides C++ projects which help with this stuff: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Cross So I'm using Python to hook my custom build jobs into the C/C++ build system (via cmake), but I still need to invoke native command line tools (or DLLs) which wrap around those Khronos libraries. Currently this means building (at least) 3 executables for Windows, macOS and Linux, and "distribute" those precompiled exes with my python code.

> I can even imagine quite well that one could write a compiler which generates SPIR-V code from HLSL shaders. Khronos are working on building this into the official SPIR-V compiler: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang/issues/362

Hopefully it will be of some help for this effort: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang/issues/362 I'm kind of surprised that this happened, though I've heard it could happen from glslang developers. It helps reducing DX/HLSL lock-in, and it's as if usual MS management responsible for such lock-in fell asleep, and developers managed to release something good for the world for once.

> What's big and bulky - shaders themselves, but there are solutions to translate them between different available languages. Those solutions aren't really ready yet: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang/issues/200