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KhronosGroup
SPIRV-Tools
C++2019–2023
KhronosGroup / SPIRV-Tools

SPIRV-Tools

Discover this repository through its Hacker News conversations.

3Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

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Where it is used

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What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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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 year4 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-09-13 02:12:42 UTC to 2023-10-11 17:20:13 UTC.

0122019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 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): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

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
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
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 UTC101

What Hacker News says

4 sources
SPIR-V is an intermediate bytecode format. That bytecode is the data that you use in the Vulkan API, and under the hood your graphics drivers compile that bytecode into the device-specific native shader binary that runs on the graphics hardware. Vulkan doesn't come with any tools to generate that bytecode though. Foreign shader language (like HLSL, GLSL, etc) to SPIR-V compilers exist, and various graphics toolchains can generate SPIR-V. https://github.com/KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Tools does have tools to validate and optimize bytecode. edit: i lied apparently - the SPIRV-Tools does have an assembler that translates text such as the "Corresponding SPIR-V" at https://registry.khronos.org/SPIR-V/specs/unified1/SPIRV.htm... to bytecode. However, that's not something you'd want to write manually, especially if you're used to something like GLSL.
In Vulkan Documentation
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
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.
In Raw WebGPU

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