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KhronosGroup
SPIRV-Cross
GLSL2016–2024
KhronosGroup / SPIRV-Cross

SPIRV-Cross

SPIRV-Cross is a practical tool and library for performing reflection on SPIR-V and disassembling SPIR-V back to high level languages.

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Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
5Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.6KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

SPIRV-Cross is a practical tool and library for performing reflection on SPIR-V and disassembling SPIR-V back to high level languages.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

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 year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-05-05 14:54:18 UTC to 2024-10-11 19:13:18 UTC.

0122016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

7 sources
Jasper_·Jan 12, 2020
Let me offer a rebuttal to that page. > First, SPIR-V was not written with security as a first principle, and it’s unclear whether it can be modified to satisfy the security requirements of the web. At the time of this post's authoring, Google already had a set of SPIR-V restrictions to make it suitable for the web [0]. The only response from Apple I heard was "it doesn't have tests", but, again, it had more than WSL at the time [1]. [0] https://github.com/gpuweb/spirv-execution-env/blob/master/ex... [1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Tools/blob/master/test... > Forking the SPIR-V language means developers would have to recompile their shaders, possibly being forced to rewrite their source code anyway. They might have to rewrite some small portions of their shader code to target WebGPU, or run some preprocessing tools to validate i
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t. I don't think this was ever a problem. This is basically saying "if they have to change it anyway, why not rewrite it in an entirely new language", but most realistic shader code would be unaffected. > Additionally, browsers would still be unable to trust incoming bytecode, and would be required to validate programs to make sure they are not doing anything insecure. Browsers need to validate WSL/WHLSL too for things like out-of-bounds array accesses. > And since Windows and macOS/iOS don’t support Vulkan, the incoming SPIR-V would still need to be translated/compiled into another language. This is also true for WSL/WHLSL. But SPIR-V has a leg up here, as existing community cross-compile tools like SPIRV-Cross exist [2]. [2] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Cross/ The argument that we have against WSL/WHLSL is that we do not trust the developers of these specifications to correctly understand the GPU programming environment, and involving IHVs in WSL/WHLSL's design is a waste of time, when they have already produced SPIR-V over many years.
In Raw WebGPU
robmaister·May 3, 2019
I'm not familiar with the specifics within gfx-hal, but it's most likely taking in SPIR-V and translating as needed. AFAIK DX12 still requires DXIL so it might be saving both SPIR-V and DXIL, or taking in HLSL and compiling/translating as needed. Microsoft has generally gotten a lot friendlier in the last decade, they have tools to compile HLSL down to SPIR-V, if you want to support everything including DX12 you'll probably be writing HLSL. Otherwise you can pick any language that compiles down to SPIR-V. https://github.com/Microsoft/ShaderConductor https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Cross
In A Guide to Rust Graphics Libraries as of 2019
flohofwoe·Apr 16, 2019
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.
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It looks like with this python+wasmer solution, I can instead compile the Khronos libraries into WASM modules, and the result runs "anywhere" where wasmer runs (e.g. also Raspberry Pi, BSDs etc...). That's really cool stuff :)
In Wasmer: A Python library for executing WebAssembly binaries

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