shader-slang

slang

C++2019–2025

shader-slang / slang

slang

Making it easier to work with shaders

Systems & Infrastructure

Explore on GitHub Read Hacker News discussions

6Distinct people

7Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

5.8KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Making it easier to work with shaders

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

gpuweb/gpuweb · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 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: 2019-02-28 12:58:52 UTC to 2025-01-11 13:18:43 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

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
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	1	1	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	4	0	4
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1

What Hacker News says

7 sources

carom·Jan 11, 2025

It is Slang. A very cool project and it only got its public release relatively recently, so some sins are forgiven but there are so many typedefs. typedef struct ShaderReflection ProgramLayout; typedef enum SlangReflectionGenericArgType GenericArgType; https://github.com/shader-slang/slang/blob/master/include/sl...

In C++26: A Placeholder with No Name

flakiness·Dec 3, 2024

https://github.com/shader-slang/slang It's kind of both. It can generate High level shaders as well as SPIRV, according to the doc. I interpret this announcement as more about the governance of the open source project than brand new anything. The project has been around for years and there are even some SIGGRAPH papers in this thing.

In Khronos Group adopts the Slang shading language

raphlinus·Dec 1, 2024

I see your point, but one issue is that you can't go from HLSL or GLSL to WGSL for compute work, as the way atomics are typed is incompatible[1]. That's a primary reason we (currently) use WGSL, because going from that to legacy shader languages does work. But then you have all the limitations of WGSL. Slang had to make a change to its type system[2] to make this work. But they did it, and as a result Slang is appealing as an "apex" language - you can translate from that to anything, and also get advanced features lacking in WebGPU. [1]: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/2377 [2]: https://github.com/shader-slang/slang/issues/5084

In The Slang Shading Language

raphlinus·Sep 2, 2024

Faith Ekstrand has an impressive track record of compiler work and has written a few blog posts[1], [1a]. Her Mastodon[2] is also worth a follow. SPIR-V is important in the compute shader space, especially because DXIL and Metal's AIR are similar. I'm going to link three articles critical of SPIR-V: [3], [4], [5]. WebGPU [6] is interesting for a number of reasons, largely because they're trying to actually nail down the semantics, and also make it safe (see the uniformity analysis [7] in particular, which is a very "compiler" approach to a GPU-specific problem). Both Tint and naga projects are open source, with lots of high quality discussion in the issue trackers. Shader languages suck, and we really need a good one. Promising approaches are Circle [8] (which is C++ based, very advanced but not open source), and Slang [9] (an evolution o

Read the rest

f HLSL). The Vcc work (also related to [4]) is worth studying. Best of luck! This is a fascinating, if frustrating, space, and there's lots of room to improve things. [1]: https://www.gfxstrand.net/faith/blog/ [1a]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2024/04/25/re-c... [2]: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@gfxstrand [3]: https://kvark.github.io/spirv/2021/05/01/spirv-horrors.html [4]: https://xol.io/blah/the-trouble-with-spirv/ [5]: https://themaister.net/blog/2022/08/21/my-personal-hell-of-t... [6]: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb [7]: https://www.w3.org/TR/2022/WD-WGSL-20220505/#uniformity-over... [8]: https://www.circle-lang.org/site/index.html [9]: https://github.com/shader-slang/slang

In Ask HN: Resources for GPU Compilers?

billconan·Apr 2, 2024

or maybe support https://github.com/shader-slang/slang

In 3D + 2D: Testing out my cross-platform WASM graphics engine

kitschyred·Jul 21, 2022Submission

Shader-slang/slang: Making it easier to work with shaders

2 points · Open discussion

freddybobs·Feb 28, 2019

The Slang compiler is OSS (MIT) and is under active development here... https://github.com/shader-slang/slang

In Slang: language mechanisms for extensible real-time shading systems (2018) [pdf]