FLflohofwoe·Oct 23, 2020
SPIRV can also be used as intermediate format and converted to various target shader languages:
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Cross
In Rust-GPUKhronosGroup
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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7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.6KGitHub stars
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.
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Where it is used
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What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 6:36:16 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.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourcesLet 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
Read the rest
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.