SPIRV-Cross

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

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.